


Kim's game

by tellie



Series: Kim's game [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alcohol Abuse, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Brief description of violence, Drug Use (Mentioned), Gen, Honestly not as dark as it sounds, Horror, Mentioned suicide, Mystery, Paranoia, Suspense, mentally unstable or has paranormal abilities, no graphical descriptions though, some sexual content, use of alcohol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:27:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 74,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25201648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tellie/pseuds/tellie
Summary: (Not an OC story, despite the name)A new semester has started, but the students take some time to enjoy the last days of summer sun. The school, life and everything is running smoothly. That is, until trust and tranquillity within the community are shattered by a violent murder.For Renji, this is not exactly the beginning. He used to know the knife-wielding girl. He even attended her funeral. His past is catching up with him, or maybe it’s the other way around, but the shit-show he calls his life is starting to get seriously weird. Like, in a paranormal way.
Relationships: Abarai Renji & Hisagi Shuuhei & Kira Izuru, Abarai Renji & Kuchiki Rukia, Hinamori Momo/Kira Izuru, Renji and Rangiku end up having sex but aren’t in a relationship
Series: Kim's game [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1751098
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A huge thanks to polynya, without whom the English version of this story wouldn’t be happening. She sorted through not only the language (of the story, not these notes which I type as I go!) but also details that were off for for various reasons.
> 
> Technically speaking this is the second part of a series, Kim’s game, but the first part is a short one-shot prologue, [At one evening in a convenience store](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24257608). The first part mostly just shows the characters in their everyday activities, so reading it isn’t needed to understand this.
> 
> The tags and the rating… I’d say the story falls between Teen and Up and Mature, so I rated it Mature, mostly because of the dark-ish stuff I tagged as warnings. This isn’t an angst fest by any means, but the whole style/genre ‘mentally unstable or has paranormal abilities’ comes with some implications by default.
> 
> You can expect weekly updates, but I promise nothing :3

_Kim’s game: a memory game named after the novel ‘Kim’ (R. Kipling, 1901). A player or players are shown items such as picture cards. One or more items are then removed in secret. The target of the game is to remember and name the item or items missing._

* * *

Click. Click. Click.

A quiet sound carried from the last row. A young man repeatedly pressed his pen on the table, loaded the spring and let the pen go. It jumped several centimeters every time.

If he had any concerns about his future beyond the current day’s afternoon, he’d be making notes, not playing. Today’s topic was not easy for him. 

The lecturer was presenting an example of an initial value problem well suited for iterative methods. For a while now, the lecturer had been writing down something that felt like the mother of all expressions in small text and poor hand.

Every step was explained, but the lecturer’s voice was that of an old academic: dry and somewhat cracking. Easy to listen to, easier to block out.

Outside, an almost unnaturally warm Indian summer had taken hold.

The pleasant weather was tempting. The summer had been cold and rainy. Only after the semester had started, had the first heat wave of the whole summer hit School Island. 

The summertime promises of a new, disciplined life of study faded. Portable barbecues were popping out of every possible corner. The students walked from place to place with bags full of food and beer, skipping lectures without caring whether it was Friday or Wednesday.

The temptation of drink, sun, and girls in tiny bikinis felt especially difficult to resist during mathematics lectures. Staying indoors seemed like both a sin and a shame when it was so perfect outdoors.

Judging by the faces of the few students who had actually attended the lecture, this wasn’t an unusual attitude.

Renji wasn’t paying much attention to other students at the moment. He knew most of them by face and name, but only considered himself friends with two people in this group. They were Izuru, his friend since childhood, and Momo, both sitting one row ahead of him.  
Renji wasn’t paying much attention to the lecture either. He could hear the words but didn’t grasp the meaning behind them.

_The initial guess, blah blah, a system of equations can be formed, blah blah, the matrix, blah blah blah._

He threw the pen on the table in a bout of frustration. He had worked hard to be in the same university with his friend and planned to keep up the good work, but there were days he just couldn’t find the motivation.

This was one of those days.

Renji closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the table. Apparently, Momo noticed the movement and turned to see the gesture. Her laughter, so quiet it was hardly audible, joined the chorus of clicks of pens and pained sighs. 

Unlike the constant sighing, the laugh gained the lecturer’s attention. He turned around to look the class. Momo moderated herself immediately.

“Do you think we should take a break?” the lecturer asked, assessing how deep the lack of interest ran in his students.

Sighs changed to murmurs of approval. Even Renji lifted his head.

“Cigarette-length one needed in here,” he said aloud.

The lecturer agreed, with a recommendation to visit the coffee machine.

The students somewhat dragged their feet when walking out. Many put their books away with an obvious intent to cut the rest of the class. 

Renji, Momo and Izuru decided to stay until the end, sweet or bitter.

All three bought a cup of coffee from an automate and steered towards the smoking area. They found that even it was more quiet than typical.

Only Renji lit up. Momo had never smoked and Izuru had quit it among most of his other bad habits when he had started dating Momo. 

Renji, free from such pressure, had always failed in his attempts to quit. On vacation it was easy to pop nicotine tablets and to avoid smoking for weeks, but it always changed during a semester. Coffee and cigarettes became a small piece of heaven between lectures.

“What are you going to do after class?” Momo asked and took a step sideways to avoid the smoke. She disliked the smell more than she let on, Renji knew.

“No idea, but I’ll lose it if I can’t find something. Feels like I’m wasting what’s left my youth.”

“Don’t even, you’re younger than me or Momo,” Izuru reminded, although their difference in age was mere months. “Have you talked to Rangiku? Maybe she’s organizing something.”

Momo gave a laugh, one of her quiet and gentle ones. “When isn’t she?”

The question was fully rhetorical. Both Izuru and Renji smiled. 

“Hey, that’s her, now,” Izuru said suddenly and waved to the blond walking towards the main door. Rangiku waved back and changed her course.

“Hi,” she said when closer. “Nice earrings, Momo.”

Momo lifted her hand to touch a small transparent stone attached to a silver chain and hook. The stone was cut to prisms. The bright daylight split to all the colors of a rainbow, dancing on her neck.

“Thank you so much. Izuru gave them to me as an anniversary present. Do you have a new necklace too?”

“Yeah,” Rangiku said with wide grin and lifted her pendant to show it off better. It was a small glass vial, or maybe a stylized miniature bottle. Flakes of gold floated free in the transparent liquid.

“I got it from a man, too. He said he thought of me the moment he saw it.”

“Oh, who? Are you together, like officially? Please tell me!”

Rangiku’s innocent tone didn’t even waver. “Gin, my cousin, send this back from his travels abroad. He said he thought I’d like this, the gold doesn’t sink at all. I think it’s some kind of a suspension.”

Renji smirked. Rangiku liked to mislead, then tell the truth and get some laughs. One never knew what she was up to.

“What’re you doing in here anyway?” Izuru changed the topic. “We thought you’d be planning a party.”

“Oh, we are. I was just headed to the cafeteria, to grab a late lunch. Did you eat already?”

The others nodded. Rangiku’s look turned to disappointment for a second, but then the delight was back. “Would you like to come this evening? I could use Renji. Hair down, wear a white T-shirt.”

“What’s the plan?”

Renji’s voice carried suspicion. He generally liked Rangiku’s antics, but once, when he had agreed without knowing what he was saying yes to, the ladies had honed their skills in hairdressing on him. 

Voluminous curls and big pink bows simply hadn’t looked good on him. The ladies had photos to prove it.

“Always thinking about the hairdo thing,” Rangiku said with playfully pretended hurt. “But if you must know, some guys got this idea to have a Miss Wet T-Shirt competition. We girls, of course, thought it was disgustingly sexist.”

“So you figured you needed a men’s series too,” Momo completed the thought. Four years ago, the thought alone would have made her blush, but her time at university had taught her more than how to solve initial value problems.

Rangiku nodded. “Mr. Wet T-Shirt is the first series. Renji should do well. All that ink… half hidden, half visible under the wet shirt, m-mm…”

“How do you know he has ink under his clothes?”  
Rangiku lifted a finger on her lips and feigned thinking very carefully. Then she winked to the audience. “We went swimming last summer.”

Momo and Izuru laughed. Renji took a look at the clock and put his cigarette out.

“Adventures in the Matrix, part N,” he reminded everyone. “I’ll be there, this evening.”

“In a white T-shirt?” Rangiku made sure, when the empty coffee cups were thrown in the trash and the whole group headed into the school building.

* * *

The early evening didn’t offer much relief in terms of temperature, but it helped wipe away all memories of the existence of mathematics. 

Calculus had no room in Renji’s mind when he sat on a bench on a grassy field, holding a can of beer in his hand and a half-burned corncob on his plate. The beer was cold, the corn reasonably close to warm, and the girls had screamed him to third place in the Mr. Wet T-shirt competition. He was fully enjoying this moment.

After receiving his prize (the half-burnt corncob), he had changed into dry clothes and came back to the field just in time to watch the women’s series. Rangiku had won, no questions asked. The winner behaved more drunk than she was, Renji suspected, and she still wore the wet shirt. She, too, was clearly enjoying herself, and the undivided attention of most of the men in her close proximity.

“You gay or what?” a second year student suddenly asked when Renji’s attention wandered from Rangiku.

At first Renji didn’t even realize he was spoken to, but the man seemed to expect an answer.

“And if I am? The real question is why you’re more interested in me than in looking at her.”

The younger student looked back in confusion, lifted his beer and poured some in his already open mouth. His attention drifted back to Rangiku.

Renji felt like laughing. Some people were just too fun to confuse.

It wasn’t that he didn’t find Rangiku beautiful, but the Internet was full of pictures and videos of blonds even bustier than she was. Besides, she wasn’t his type. She was too tall, too blond, and much, much too aware of her looks. Also, much too eager to use her looks for her benefit.  
The sun set. The temperature drifted to the range more suitable for human life, and Rangiku vanished to change her clothes. 

In Renji’s sight, her form was replaced by another blond. Izuru wandered around the field, clearly drunk as a skunk.

He hadn’t shaken all his bad habits, after all.

“W-where is Momo?” he asked after managing to wander to Renji. He had closed an eye, probably because it helped him to see things in sharper focus.

“Went to the locker room with Rangiku.”

Izuru gave a careless nod and turned to face the building. He had taken more than a few steps before Renji decided that an intervention would be for the common good.

“Listen, Izuru?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s women’s locker room. No men allowed.”

“Oh? Yeah. So.” 

Izuru sounded stunned and stopped on his feet, as if not knowing what to do.

Renji hmphed. He already knew how Izuru was going to spend the next day. “Wait here with me, she’ll see us when they’re ready. You can have what’s left of my corn.”

Izuru obeyed and started to eat eagerly. The fact the leftovers were more coal than corn didn’t seem to hinder his appetite.

“Where did you lose Shuhei?” Renji asked, referring to a PhD student a couple of years older than they were.

Izuru hick-upped. “G-gave up. Went home. ‘Cos puking.”

“Already? It’s nothing o’clock.”

Izuru hick-upped again and Renji decided there was no trusting him. Momo wouldn’t be happy when she returned.

In truth, Renji, too, was more than slightly irritated himself. He rarely went overboard with drinking these days, and couldn’t help feeling that Shuhei and Izuru had never even tried learning to moderate.

It was in the genes, he sometimes thought, as both Izuru and Shuhei had ended in the children’s home because of their parents’ substance abuse issues. Renji himself was free of such baggage, being a foundling. A cleaning lady had found him as a newborn in an airport bathroom trash bin, or so it read in his file.

Whether genetics or just plain old fucking idiotic stupidity, Renji was starting to get tired of drunk Izuru and drunker Shuhei.  
Izuru hick-upped for the third time. Renji looked at him with some caution.

“You aren’t about to puke, too, are you?”

Izuru wasn’t, not at the moment, at least, but he didn’t answer either. Renji grabbed a new beer from the cooler and made some space between him and his friend. Just to be sure.

Izuru made poor company at the moment. Momo would likely take him home after getting back. If Shuhei had left too, Renji faced an evening alone, or at best with casual acquaintances. He could as well go back home and study initial value problems.

The mere thought of the topic made Renji remember why having some fun had felt so important. 

Casual acquaintances were future friends, right? If no one else, Rangiku was there, and would be for foreseeable future.

He could feel his good mood coming back.

Then everything even resembling a good mood broke to pieces.

Just as Momo and Rangiku came out from the locker room, Renji _felt_. It was red and black and scorching hot, but so cold it made goose bumps rise on his skin. It like was a spiteful glare, or a malicious laugh echoing in an empty lobby. Nails on a chalkboard, a dentist’s drill hitting a nerve.

Renji knew Rangiku, Momo and Izuru felt the same. Izuru turned his head so fast he almost fell from the bench, while Rangiku and Momo stopped and fell silent for a moment.

Some others felt similarly, too. No one else had ever said anything to Renji. Even now Momo and Rangiku looked each other, gave small laughs and continued as nothing had happened.

No one ever said a thing. No one wanted to be the crazy person.

Crazy or not, Renji, Shuhei and Izuru had started to feel after Rukia had gone missing. Renji had tried to convince the adults it was real, and the concerned employees of the children's home had sent him to a psychiatrist.

He had stopped talking about it, but had never stopped feeling it. As he got older, he realized that no one else had been idiotic enough to speak of it in the first place.

The sensation passed, taking the pieces of Renji’s good mood with it. Unlike Rangiku and Momo, he couldn’t simply push it from his mind. It made a home in the pit of his stomach and would keep eating him from the inside until he felt sick.

“Momo, hey,” he yelled, when she came within hearing distance. She heard and turned to him.

“I’m going home,” Renji continued. “Can you get Izuru home safely to sleep it off?”

Momo walked to them. Her face was somewhat sour and serious, but she nodded.

“I’ll look after him. Are you ok, Renji? You look... kind of not good. Sorry.”

“Nah”, Renji answered, attempting a smile and failing. “No worries, Momo. I just think I’m about to have a migraine. I got zigzag’s dancing in front of me like an epileptic stripper.”

Momo ignored the joke. “That’s too bad. Do you want painkillers? I think I have some Ibuprofen with me, if you want some.”

“Thanks, but no, I have my own. Just see he gets home in one piece,” Renji nodded in the general direction of Izuru, who seemed to be experiencing increasing difficulties just sitting on the bench. “Then I can heed home in clean conscience.”

That sat well with Momo, and Renji was free to leave.

Before he was halfway there, he realized he didn’t want to be home. He was too restless to make and eat an evening snack, brush his teeth and try to sleep on the cheap mattress that came with the rent.

 _Feeling_ had caused Renji’s worst memories to surface. Once awakened, they simply refused to go. Without any desire to, Renji found himself thinking about the day that had flipped his life upside down.

It wasn’t the day he had ended up in the children’s home. He didn’t even remember that, being practically newborn, and life in the home had been a lot better than books and TV usually made it seem. But the building itself had been big and old, full of history and ghost stories.

Inspired by one, the boys, meaning Renji, Izuru and Shuhei, had once convinced Rukia to enter the “haunted” laundry room at nighttime. They had stayed in the corridor, listening the slow steps of a young child who hugged her plush toy in fear.

The steps had made room for silence, and that silence was followed by a bloodcurdling scream, oh so full of fear. That was when Renji had _felt_ for the first time. The boys had run to their room and left Rukia to her way back.

The next morning she had been nowhere to be found.

The employees had searched the home. After they got nothing, Shuhei had confessed, as was his responsibility as the oldest. After the search was concentrated to the laundry room, a broken window, few splashes of blood and black hair stuck on window handle had been found.

Then, the police came.

The guilt Renji carried had never truly faded, but he had learned how to live with it. He hadn’t had much choice on that.

He walked the campus until he came across a soccer field. It had two locker rooms, men’s and women’s, and a smaller one for referees and likes. The referees’ locker room stood next to women’s’, and Renji knew he could use it to climb on the higher roof.

When a teenager, he had spent serious amount of time on roof of a shabby, practicably abandoned locker room close to the children’s home, smoking until his head spun or the packet was empty. These days there was not much point in it, but the impulse was there and he gave in.

Once he was up on the roof, Renji sat on its edge and looked out at the dark, empty field. The only lights he saw were the orange glow of his cigarette, the blueish white of the stars and the creamy yellow of the moon, although some light from the well-lit footpath behind him crept onto the field.

Despite it, the darkness was velvety and pleasant, that of a warm summer night.

But not deep enough to let the movement in the men’s locker room to go unnoticed. 

At first Renji watched with mild curiosity. Typically, the locker rooms were kept locked when not in use and clearly no one was having a nighttime soccer tournament, but whatever was going on wasn’t his business. In truth, he didn’t give a shit if some highschoolers had broken in to make out or sip beer, or whatever the kids did these days.

Then his whole being was cut through by _it_ , the sheer strength of the sensation disorienting him.

After the night Rukia had gone missing, he hadn’t felt it so strongly. He couldn’t remember being so afraid since childhood. He wanted to be in his bed, to pull the covers over his head, so that only his nose and mouth would be exposed to whatever danger lurked in the dark.

He didn’t have covers, or bed. He sat on a roof of a locker room, tipsy but not drunk, and armed with nothing but a half-finished cigarette. 

And after living most of his life afraid, he realized something.

He was done with it. Just fucking done.

Renji threw the cigarette on the ground and got down as fast as he could without breaking any bones. The distance between him and men’s locker room wasn’t much, and he ran as fast as he could.

He entered the building without letting himself to think. Above the open door was a pale green emergency exit light. It was dim, hardly bright enough to reveal wooden benches, the lockers, and the showers at the end of the room. 

The light also revealed two persons: a tall, thin man in white, and a short but equally thin woman in black.

He could see a knife handle sticking from the man’s chest. Blood flowed from that wound, and others. Renji had never seen so much blood in one place.

The woman pulled the knife out and turned around, as if she had sensed someone coming. Her face was familiar to Renji. It had lost its childlike innocence, but he had no doubt. The woman was Rukia.

She stared at Renji for a second, almost as if she knew him too. The distance between them was mere meters. 

Without any warning, she raised the knife and ran towards Renji. 

He realized he was practically blocking the only way out, but he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think.

Her knife cut from up to down, and the sudden pain made him to take an instinctive step to the side. 

She ran out and was gone in seconds.

Renji felt the need to run after her, but the man in white had slumped on the floor. Renji felt like someone else when he crouched next to the man to feel his pulse.

There was none. All the wounds had stopped bleeding. 

All the blood that was supposed to be in had come out. The thought felt like it came from somewhere outside him. There was nothing to be done.

The man’s body was still warm (of course it was warm) but he was dead. His clothes were wet with blood and his hair, also white, was spotted with it. His eyes were so pale he must have looked lifeless even when he was alive. The light was too poor to tell the exact color of his eyes.

No matter the eye color, the man no longer saw the changing room, or smelled its characteristic perfume of feet and old sports equipment. The man stared into the empty sockets of the Grim Reaper, or maybe he looked into the dark currents of the River Styx.

Renji stared him for a while, then pressed his hand on his own side and flinched with pain. His touch met warm wetness, but he didn’t stop to think his own wound beyond the immediate pain. His whole attention was fixed on the dead man.

Even the man’s skin was almost white with blood loss. The only color Renji could see, besides all the white and the dark red of blood, was the bright orange of the headphones the man wore around his neck. 

Even they were splashed with blood 

Someone was walking outside. Renji could hear the steps= and didn’t have much time to act. On an impulse he pulled the cord of the earphones. It came out bloody, dragging an equally bloody connector but no player or phone with it.

Renji took the headphones. The steps were closer now, and if he ran, he’d undoubtedly be seen. Thus, he had only one choice.

Fitting himself in one of the lockers was not nearly as easy as it was painful. The pain made his head clearer. Thinking was getting easier.

The sound of the steps changed. The shoes must be meeting locker room floor instead of soft grass, he thought. It was a woman’s walk, and he hoped Rukia had come back. 

The echoing scream told Renji the woman was not Rukia.

More steps followed, then a brief silence and then more steps. The heels met the soft grass again.

Renji could only guess that whoever had interrupted them had checked the dead man’s pulse, and was currently calling emergency services.

Which was exactly what he should be doing, instead of half-standing, half-sitting in someone’s sports locker. The aforementioned someone’s clearly non-washed sports pants dangled against his face, and he stood on candy wrappers and now-crushed cans and sports drink bottles.

He waited in the locker five minutes or so before peeking out. The dead man was still on the floor, in the same position Renji had left him. They were the only ones in the room.

Or, Renji though, maybe he was alone. It depended on how you liked to look at these things. 

He walked out as fast and as quiet he could. He didn’t see anyone, but had little doubt that the police were on their way.

* * *

When his apartment door closed, Renji closed his eyes in relief. His clothes were damp and sticky with blood. Had someone walked on him in the well-lit corridor, the red stain and cut shirt would have been next to impossible to miss.

He sat to next to the door, unlaced his shoes and dropped them on the floor. His hands were steady. 

Maybe he hadn’t yet comprehended what had happened. It all felt like a movie he had started to watch somewhere in the middle. The characters were half-brained strangers, the plot made no sense and the special effects were shitty. The blood looked like off-color ketchup.

Better to make good use of it as long as it lasted, Renji found himself thinking through the haze still fogging his head. He started by organizing all his footwear (sandals, combat boots and running shoes) in a neat row.  
He stood up, opened the bathroom door and wiggled out from his t-shirt. Blood had already glued the cloth on his skin. All the moving made the wound bleed more.

Renji looked at his bare chest in the mirror. The wound was long, ten centimeters or so. It descended from right to left and ended just above his lowest ribs. A long gash, but not deep. The edges looked clean as far as Renji could tell. A couple of stitches would do good though.

He had made stitches before, but never onto himself. During their later years in the children's home, the boys had occasionally engaged in what Renji liked to call boyish pranks. Often it had been easier to stitch each other up, rather than to confess and face the consequences. The kit was still in his medicine cabinet, buried under copies of old prescriptions and leftover drugs. 

Still holding the bloody shirt, he opened the bathroom door again. Opposite it was a cleaning cabinet, and it in a plastic bucket. He dumped the shirt in the bucket and took it back to the bathroom, this time locking the door behind him.

He took off all his clothes. Only his socks had been saved from bloodstains. All the clothes went into the bucket and he filled it with cold water. No point in boiling the blood on the clothes, no point at all. 

He poured a liberal amount of washing soap in and placed the bucket under the sink, and re-focused on cleaning himself.

Water stung. That was nothing in comparison to the burn the disinfectant gave when Renji poured it directly onto the wound.

When the burning subsided, Renji realized he was squeezing the sink edge with both hands. He let go and breathed out, then in. He got his normal breath back slowly, and the tiny red, purple and strangely shimmering black dots receded from his vision.

The next step was making the actual stitches.

The needles were single-packaged. When he opened the package, he saw the familiar shape of the metal, like the very edge of a crescent moon. A thin plastic string was attached to it.

Renji used pliers to grab the needle and place it on his skin, but he didn’t have the courage to pierce it.

Small tidy stitches, he repeated in his mind. Not too long, not too short. Place the point of the needle at a right angle to the skin. One movement with the wrist, not slow but not rushed either. The needle comes though first, then comes the string. Lift it with the pliers, make the knot. Make sure it isn’t too tight. A few more knots so that the stitch won’t get loose. Then cut the excess string. Repeat as many times as needed.

Doing stitches on an orange was much easier than doing them on a human being.

Doing stitches on someone else was much easier than doing them on himself.

Lack of local anesthesia didn’t help at all.

Renji steeled himself for the first move, held his breath and twisted his wrist. The needle slid through the tissue, and he reminded himself to breath. 

The smooth plastic string glided almost but not fully painlessly inside the skin. The knots finished the stitch.

The worst stitch wasn’t the first one. 

Before the first, one didn’t know how much it hurt. Before the second, one knew, but didn’t know if he had the courage to do it again.

Renji didn’t have many viable options. He gritted his teeth and made the second stitch.

After the last one he sat on the bathroom floor and rested his back to the wall. He closed his eyes, and noticed he was starting to tremble. Maybe it was from relief, maybe from the shock of it all, maybe tiredness, maybe all three combined. He felt a sudden wave of nausea, but it passed before he had time to even properly notice it.

He forced himself to stand up. The wound needed dressing.

The sterile cloth was years past its date but Renji didn’t have anything better and used it anyway. He taped the cloth at place with surgical tape and hoped for the best. Then he allowed himself to go to bed and cry himself to sleep, and soon found he was past caring about anything but rest.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2, in which no one is having a good time, but the clouds come with a silver lining. 
> 
> Again, thanks to polynya for beta reading!

The Looney Tunes intro played from the cellphone. It woke Renji up and he tried to grab it. He felt around for it on the table next to his bed, then the floor and, finally, the bed. 

The phone was under his pillow.

He switched the alarm off, rolled over onto his back and stared the ceiling.

He had never been one to wake up early just to enjoy the first rays of the rising sun or the sound of the morning birds. He was, however, used to waking for school. The lectures usually started at eight, ten on some days.

If he wanted to, shower, eat something, and be on time, he had to be up an hour and a half before the lecture. Usually, he snoozed half an hour and skipped either showering or eating.

This time, he seriously considered sleeping in and skipping the lectures altogether. Witnessing a murder took its toll. 

The Material Mechanics lecturer wasn’t any good at teaching anyway.

When it was so hot, skipping the shower was a crime against humanity. Despite the early morning, the apartment was hot as hell. The sheets were soaked with sweat.

Mathematics started at twelve. He’d go to maths.

* * *

This time the cellphone rang with the Mexican hat dance. Renji startled to full consciousness and answered without even seeing who was calling.

“Morning, Renji”, he heard Momo’s voice on the line. “I was wondering if you were coming to the math lectures today? I mean, you weren’t in M&M. I hope you don’t still have a migraine?”

“Mig--” Renji started before remembering the white lie. “No, it came and went. I just woke up, I’ll be there. What time is it?”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up. It’s only ten, M&M just ended.”

“No, thanks for calling, I bet I’d have overslept… Did you understand what we covered yesterday? In math?”

Momo’s answer, which was ‘yes’ but with a lot more words, wasn’t a surprise.

“Would you mind going over it with me? If I meet you, say, 11:30 at the cafeteria? My treat, for you and Izuru too, if he’ll survive the trip to school.”

Momo’s voice turned sour. “He was still sleeping on the bathroom floor when I went to brush my teeth this morning.”

“Owwie. I take he isn’t coming then.”

“But I can meet you,” Momo changed the topic and re-gained her typical cheerful note, although it sounded slightly strained. “I’m happy to help.”

Renji said his goodbyes and left the phone on the pillow. He sat up and undid the wound dressings. There was some blood in them, but it had already dried. The stitches seemed ok, and the wound didn’t look too bad either. Some redness and swelling, nothing to be worried about.

There was soreness, too, Renji noticed when he stood up and walked to the bathroom. He thanked himself for his choice to live alone. In a dormitory, the wound and the self-made stitches would have gained interest, which he didn’t particularly want in the current situation.

After his morning routine, Renji re-dressed the wound, and took a look at the clothes he had worn the previous day.

The clothes, he concluded, were goners. The shirt, of course, had an obvious hole where the knife had cut through. The pants were too bloody to be salvaged with any reasonable amount of work and washing.

Renji twisted the clothes more or less dry and stuck them into a trash bag. He’d take the trash out when leaving to school.

The fridge was empty, except for some spare leftovers that were starting to look suspicious. He had a piece of bread and a cup of strong coffee instead. While eating, he tried to make a shopping list, but his thoughts wandered back to the previous night.

Rukia.

Rukia, who had gone missing almost 20 years ago, had now killed a person and slashed Renji with a knife. 

Not to kill him, he deducted. What he had seen on the white-haired man proved she could have done something worse than a mere careless slash.

Nevertheless, is was the first time someone had actually cut Renji with a knife. He had been threatened with a knife before, on multiple occasions, in fact. Once with a gun even, when he had been involved in stupid shit when he was younger. But no one had ever made real of the threat.

Back then, he had interpreted some laws as loose guidelines. Yet never, ever had he thought he’d protect a killer. 

Which was exactly what he was doing, he figured. Instead of calling for help, he had gone and stuck his sticky fingers into the crime scene. 

What the hell had he been thinking, taking those earphones? Bloody, outdated and just plain fugly earphones, full of the victim’s DNA.

Nothing, he answered himself, as he took the last bite of the bread. The stupidity of his actions amazed him.

He decided to take a detour on the way to school. Then he’d be able to see the football field and the locker rooms. The police had likely left, but maybe he’d get his head straight. Seeing the place in daylight had to help, hadn’t it?

The street was almost as hot as the apartment, but the heat didn’t seem to bother anyone who walked past Renji. Most of them were smiling and seemed more than just satisfied with their lives.

The weather hadn’t gotten old yet. After a week or two, the enjoyment would wear off, assuming it wouldn’t wear off before that.

Renji didn’t have to wait two weeks to feel miserable.

He wasn’t in a real hurry, detour or not, and that seemed the be the problem. His thoughts ran the loop they had started right after he had hung up to Momo. Rukia, the murder, the headphones, and the memory of the hot-cold horror of _feeling_ took turns in his mind.

When he got to the football field, Renji saw the police tape around the building but didn’t see any police. The locker room door was locked with a heavy padlock. 

The place looked very different in daylight. The field was bright green and well-kept, spare around the playing area, where the grass hadn’t been cut for a while. Clovers and dandelions peeked out from the green, luring in butterflies and bumblebees.

A bit further, where the trees cast shadow, Renji could see a small spotted dog. The dog lay down, panting, the length of its leash lying slack on the ground. The other end of the leash was firmly held by a boy in a high school uniform, whose hair was so orange it had to be dyed. The sky above it all was blue and free of clouds of any color.

Renji closed his eyes and opened them again. The world around him hadn’t changed a bit. 

“Hey, kid, what happened in here?”

The boy gave a quick look to Renji before turning his eyes back to the locker room.

“I heard some guy died yesterday. The sports classes are all canceled, and all.”

“And all?” 

The boy just shrugged. “Nothing, I guess.”

“That so?” Renji said and continued to walk without waiting for an answer.

The boy gave none either. He stared the building as if thinking that if he stared long enough, he’d see through the walls.

Renji found that visiting the football field hadn’t made his head any clearer, but rest of the walk to the school cafeteria was uninterrupted. Momo was already there, sipping a hot cocoa spiced with hazelnut syrup. Next to the cup was a folder full of notes.

Renji greeted her briefly. “I hope you didn’t have to wait too long. Walking took longer than I thought it would.”

“I’m in no hurry.” Momo said, her smile looking somehow taxed. “To tell the truth, I don’t want to be home watching Izuru be sick. I copied the notes for you and added some comments to explain what’s being done and why.”

“Thanks, you’re an angel. I’ll grab a coffee and something to eat. Do you want something? Coffee, or cake or the like?”

“Thank you, but there’s no need, really. It wasn’t a chore at all. I think I learn better if I try to explain it to someone else.”

Renji nodded. He bought a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich and returned to the table. This time he sat down and started to eat in silence.

“Did you hear that someone was murdered?” Momo blurted suddenly. “At the football field, the one that the high schoolers use. They haven’t even caught the person who did it. I’m scared to walk alone.”

Renji nodded again. “I heard, I happened to walk through where it happened. If you ask me, the perp’s already gone.”

“I hope so.” Momo’s smile was far from relaxed, and her voice was heavy with worry. “I found the body. The police said I don’t have anything to worry about, I didn’t even see who he was, but I can’t stop thinking...”

“The cops know what they’re talking about. But I can walk you home if it helps any,” Renji managed and coughed to loosen the lump in his throat.

“Thank you, but I didn’t mean you should feel obligated. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

Renji spent a good amount of time trying to reassure Momo. The damn girl was too kind for her own good. 

In the end Momo agreed. Likely, her fear won over her desire not to ‘inconvenience’ anyone.

“I’ve never seen anyone dead before,” she said. “There was so much blood and I could see his eyes. It felt like he looked at me, telling me that I’d be next.”

“It must’ve been shocking,” Renji said and tried to keep his own feelings in check. He remembered the empty stare in the man’s pale eyes, and the memory was much too vivid for comfort.

“It was. I feel I’m overreacting, somehow, but thank you for listening to me. Do you want to take a look at the math?”

Fuck the math, Renji thought. More important things were going on. He wanted to say that, but things needed to look normal. 

He attempted a small laugh. “I never want to, but I should. I really didn’t understand much, yesterday. Just saying, in case that somehow escaped you.”

Momo turned the folder to face Renji. “In here.”

Renji flipped the pages. Momo had a beautiful hand, easy to read. The numbers were written in tidy rows and the figures were drawn using color pencils, just for added clarity.

Renji understood even less than he had thought he did. 

“Fuck. I bet my liver we didn’t even touch any of this yet.”

The corner of Momo’s mouth moved a bit. The smile was weak, but seemed real. “You flipped too many pages. That’s a different course. Chaos theory.”

“Seriously?”

“Mm-m. That’s about the Feigenbaum first constant. Go back a bit.”

Renji did. The material became more familiar, but not necessarily much easier to understand.

* * *

Later that evening, Renji decided that going to school had been huge waste of time. He hadn’t been able to concentrate on the lecturers’ words at all.

At least he now had the notes Momo had given him, and he had walked the poor girl home. She had told him she’d see a psychologist, to talk about what she had seen and how it made her feel. 

Renji hoped she’d speak of all of it. Of the dead man, sure, if she wanted to, but Renji was sure she had _felt_ on the beach. If she’d speak of it, he’d speak, too, and then he’d make sure Izuru and Shuhei spoke as well. With the four of them in it, all them adults now, they’d be taken seriously.

He didn’t fool himself thinking it would actually happen. Momo would speak of the dead man, probably cry her eyes out and then continue her life as nothing had happened.

Maybe she’d marry Izuru some day and have a bunch of scrawny, neurotic kids who she’d mother to the point of never letting them grow up.

It was a mean thought, Renji admitted readily, and it made him feel guilty. It wasn’t even Momo’s fault, the old grudge he had thought he’d let go but apparently still carried towards Shuhei and Izuru. All those years ago he was the only one who had spoken. If the others had opened their mouths, maybe Rukia would have been found.

Would his life be different, if Rukia had been there for him? He usually thought he was doing well, considering all the wrong turns he’d taken. Things could have gone a lot worse for him.

But they could have gone a lot better. For starters, maybe, just maybe, he could’ve skipped most of those wrong turns.

He felt angry as he fried rice and frozen vegetables to pass as a dinner, and more than slightly worried that he’d get caught for what he had done to the crime scene. But there was a third emotion, as well.

Hope grew slowly. Its touch was gentle, but it broke mental walls first built almost two decades ago.

Although she was still missing, Rukia evidently wasn’t dead.

She could be found again.

When the food was ready, Renji threw himself on the sofa and started to eat. Hope won over fear and anger.

Rukia was alive. Rukia, who had disappeared and been declared dead soon after, was alive. No matter that Renji, Shuhei and Izuru had attended her funeral. She hadn’t even had a casket, so the children had placed flowers and candles on the memorial for those lost at sea.

Renji had photos of the funeral but he didn’t remember much of the day. He remembered the memorial, a various gathering of dark stones with sharp edges, and an embedded silvery metal plate with engraved sea-fearing birds. He remembered the late winter snow, melted to slush and frozen to form slippery negatives of miscellaneous shoe prints and cart wheel marks. The fragile crests of ice had crunched under their steps.

Renji didn’t really remember it, but he knew from the photos that the day had been cloudy and cold. The children gathered around the memorial were wearing warm clothes: winter jackets, stocking caps, mittens. He didn’t have many photos, it had been the time before digital cameras were common, but in one, most of the children were looking at the memorial, the flowers and the candles, but Renji looked directly into the camera. The film had captured a lost expression of a young child. 

Izuru and Shuhei had copies of the photo, as did all the children who had been in the home around the time. Only in Renji’s album, the photo was flipped so that only the blank side showed. He didn’t like any of the photos taken during the funeral, but he couldn’t stand seeing that one. Didn’t have a hearth to throw it away, either.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My usual day of updating is Tuesday, btw. I wasn't home for a couple of days so this is a bit late. Nevertheless, enter chapter 3!
> 
> Again, I thank polynya for beta reading.

Renji was awakened by the sensation of being thirsty and sweaty. He reached for the pint of water he always had on the floor next to his bed. The movement was careless, and some of the water splashed on the floor

Even the water was warm. Renji winced with the pain in his chest and looked at the clock. It wasn’t even 7. The day promised to become insanely hot. All chance of sleep was gone. 

Renji decided to get up and take a cool, refreshing shower. He let the water run on himself for a long time, washed his hair and left it dripping wet when he finished.

He had opened every window he could, but the air refused to move. He wished he had ordered a fan from some online shop. He hadn’t found any that didn’t charge extra for shipping, so he had decided to save money and wait until the next shipment arrived the island.

It was Friday now, and thus too late to order. The best-case scenario, and an unlikely one for that matter, was that he’d get the damn thing on Monday. The market usually got a shipment on Tuesday.

Four days. He’d live four days without a fan. Two of the days would make a weekend. After the Material Mechanics calculation session, one more school week would be done.

It didn’t even occur to Renji that Rangiku wouldn’t be planning fun on the beach. Momo, Izuru and Shuhei would likely be there, too, and if he watched after the boys, Wednesday’s fiasco wouldn’t have a chance to repeat itself.

Too bad couldn’t allow himself to swim. The sea water wasn’t good for the wound, and then there was the issues of curious eyes.

Wednesday past kept repeating in Renji’s mind. Momo, Rukia, that hot-cold feeling, the dead man’s earphones…

He hadn’t disposed of the earphones yet. He had thought of tossing them in the trash with the ruined clothes, but if someone had paid any attention to the bloodstained clothes, the earphones would directly link him to the dead man.

The earphones were still in the apartment, crammed in the box of miscellaneous electronics.

Renji could see the box in his mind’s eye in full detail. The earphones rested on a broken motherboard, between two old computer fans. The bearings of the black fan had started to squeak so Renji had replaced it. The orange fan had a broken blade. Under the fans and the motherboard was an old modem, put neatly away in its original box, and under it was a bunch of ethernet cables.

On top of all that old useless crap were the orange earphones and the blood that still stained them.

Suddenly he wanted to be rid of the earphones as soon as possible. Would it be safe to throw them away? What if someone had noticed his now-disposed clothes, and the police were coming to dig through the trash?

His fears were probably for nothing. But the effort of cleaning was the lesser evil, in comparison with the problems he’d face if the cops really came. Besides, he had time to scrape and wash the blood away before Material Mechanics.

While he was at it, he’d wipe his fingerprints as well.

But it was human blood. Sudden panic shot through Renji’s whole being. 

He couldn’t even touch the earphones, but he couldn’t throw them away either. Maybe the truck driver hadn’t collected Thursday’s trash. Renji didn’t know their timetable, had never before cared about it. Maybe the clothes were still in the bin, the wet textiles and the blood baking in the heat, attracting flies…

His flow of thought was interrupted when Renji reminded himself of the importance of breathing. He couldn’t let his thoughts run wild. The trash bins always stank in this weather. The smell always attracted flies. No one would pay any attention on it.

Nevertheless, keeping the earphones in the box over a couple of days probably would be for the best.

* * *

Attending class was a colossal waste of time. The study session was boring and frustrating, the amount of learning, nil.

School had one benefit though: air conditioning. Not just a random fan pointing wherever, but real, actual air conditioning capable of cooling the air. In comparison with the 30 C outdoors, or more than 35 C in Renji’s apartment, the 23 degrees felt refreshing.

The air conditioning was the main reason Renji decided to stay at school after the study session. He went to a computer lab and pretended to work on his homework assignment for Engineering Design. The key word being ‘pretending’ - the work didn’t improve much. In fact, after almost five hours in the classroom, only one Excel table got more or less finished.

The wasted time didn’t bother Renji too much. He had more than enough time to finish the assignment. The officially unofficial Facebook page informed him that the students would indeed have a party on the beach.

He could tick the box of having plans for the evening. He’d only have to buy beer and something for the grill. 

As an added bonus, coming directly from the school and the resulting lack of swimwear was a good excuse to skip the water.

When Renji got to the market, he was in good spirits. Most food that did well when grilled was sold out, as were six-packs of the beer he liked. It didn’t matter. The beer wouldn’t spoil, so he bought 24-pack. What came to food, corncobs and low-quality sausages were grossly underrated.

Taking the beer and food with him, Renji headed to the beach. He didn’t hurry, and wasn’t surprised by the almost empty beach. It was early still. 

Had he been almost any place other than School Island, the beach would’ve been occupied by screaming children and alert parents watching after them. But there were practically no families on School Island, and even fewer young children, high schoolers being the youngest group to move in.

As Renji walked the beach, he spotted swimming students and the occasional jogger. Soon they’d make room for party animals who’d be there to enjoy the grill, the gazebo and the sea.

As far as Renji knew, no one had ever drowned. He considered it a small miracle.

Despite the time, he could smell and later see smoke coming from the grill in the gazebo. A closer inspection showed that he was the first university student present. The young, almost childish faces were those of high schoolers. Renji knew only one name, but some faces were familiar. The boy with bright hair that had been on the football field on the previous day and Renji remembered the blond girl by the merit of her breasts. She made him think of a younger and more innocent Rangiku.

There was also the short, unusually young boy known by all. Toshiro Hitsugaya, a child genius. He had been moved to an upper class so often that he had skipped as many years of education as he had participated in. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

“Evening,” Renji greeted and was rewarded with indifferent politeness. “Do you mind if I sit down with you and grill something? I came from school so I’m getting hungry.”

Toshiro didn’t even smile. “You should have eaten at school then, but I don’t mind.”

Hearing that from someone who was practically a child was strangely confusing. Renji felt his face getting warm in a way that had nothing to do with the sun or air temperature.

“My name is Toshiro,” the kid continued as if he didn’t notice the blush on Renji’s face. “These are Orihime, Tatsuki, Chad, Ishida and Ichigo. We are in high school.”

Renji gave his name and lifted his belongings over the gazebo wall. He wished briefly that Orihime wore a swimming suit, but a tiny summer dress wasn’t a bad choice either. More than the clothes, he liked how she wore the innocence, much in the same way Rangiku wore her own brand of slutty charm.

“We don’t see many high schoolers in here,” he said to make conversation.

“The uni students drinking in here at this hour, that’s the rare thing,” Toshiro pointed out. The football field kid grinned. Ichigo.

“Wasn’t any point in walking home, stay there half of a second and then leave again. I’m not walking one more step in this weather than I absolutely have to.”

Orihime giggled, and the high schoolers continued their own conversation. It was about schoolwork and didn’t hold Renji’s interest. He opened a beer, threw more wood in the fire and started to roast a corncob despite too-high flames and lack of embers. He let his mind wander.

Momo would refuse to come. The thought hit Renji without any warning, but with certainty, and he didn’t understand why he was realizing it only now. She was too spooked to party, probably too spooked to go out after sunset. And when she was scared, Izuru probably wouldn’t leave her alone.

Renji waited until the discussion around him ceased and he had a chance to join in. “Can you guys watch my stuff? I ought to call someone.”

Ichigo promised he’d do it. Renji jumped out of the gazebo and gained a bit distance while thinking whether he should call Momo or Izuru. He decided Izuru was a better choice.

Izuru answered quickly. His voice was tired. 

Renji didn’t pay much attention to his tone. “Hi, I’m at the beach. I was wondering if the two of you had any plans for the evening. Wednesday was kinda short, so I thought, why not to give it a new chance.”

“Nah, Momo doesn’t want to go out. She is scared for real. You know about the murder, right?”

Renji felt his heart skipping a beat, but Izuru’s comment was completely innocent. That became evident when he continued: “She said she told you yesterday.”

“She did. I thought she might not want to come. How about you?”

“Nah,” Izuru repeated with a firmness Renji knew wouldn’t waver. “I don’t want to leave Momo alone. Besides, I don’t have much taste for boozing right now. Try calling Shuhei, and you can pretty much count Rangiku in.” 

“I’ll do that… Hey Izuru, where were you when she saw that dead man? I thought you headed home together with Momo.”

“I don’t remember it,” Izuru’s voice developed a dark tone, “but she says I was hugging a lamp-post and puking my guts out. World’s best boyfriend and so forth.”

“Well, no one could guess what was going to happen. What the hell did you drink to get so wasted anyway?”

Renji and Izuru chatted for a while before saying their goodbyes. After that, Renji chose Shuhei’s number. He listened to it ring for a while and was just about to give up when Shuhei answered.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt,” Renji said. “Where are you? There’s a strange echo.”

“At school, in a computer lab. I’m writing a paper and it was so hot at home I couldn’t fucking exist there. I’ll never ever drink again in this heat!”

Renji laughed a bit. Shuhei had used the exact phrase many times. Almost the exact phrase, anyway. “You have plans for tonight? I’m at the beach and some folks will be here sooner or later. I didn’t even see you last time. How about you come down?”

Shuhei let out a small apologetic sigh. Again, Renji knew the answer even before it was voiced.

“I don’t think I have it in me today. I’m no longer a teenager, you know, and the revisions deadline is getting close… I planned on bagging this yesterday, but I felt so shitty I didn’t get anything done. Did you ask Momo and Izuru?”

“Yeah, neither is coming. Momo was the first one in the crime scene. She’s creeped out.”

“You mean that murder?” Shuhei asked, his voice changing from casual half-boredom to extreme interest. “I didn’t think something like that would happen. It’s always been so safe and peaceful around here.”

“Yes, the murder, how many crime scenes do you think there are? I heard the victim was someone not from here, so I guess the perp was too.” 

“I guess. I just don’t get why someone would come here to get killed. Nothing but students in here.”

“Maybe he knew someone,” Renji guessed, but was more than ready to change the topic. “But I’ll let you go. If you finish that thing, or get bored, feel free to join me. I have a 24-pack.”

“I don’t even want to hear about beer… Hey, do you have Rangiku’s phone number? In case you want to ask if she’s coming. I could see if I can find it from the system.”

Renji didn’t have the number, but Shuhei found it and gave it to him. Renji thanked him and made one last try at tempting Shuhei to come, but duty won out.

Rangiku’s phone was switched off. Renji figured he either had a wrong number or the battery was dead. Either way, she’d probably come sooner or later.

On his way back to the gazebo, Renji threw the empty beer can in the trash. Someone had moved the food he had neglected. Some of it was mildly charred, but most was only extremely well-done.

“Thanks, that’s worth of a beer,” he said before realizing that his company was clearly underage. Despite that, he threw a can to Ichigo. A beer wouldn’t hurt anyone. The others didn’t seem to mind, but Toshiro gave him a sour look.

“We should be going,” the child genius said, picking up his things. “Chad, Ishida, we were supposed to finish that presentation today.”

Neither Char nor Ishida seemed to look forward it, but neither disagreed either. As they collected their belongings, also the girl called Tatsuki joined suit.

“Spot’s alone at home, I’ll heed home too. How about you, Orihime?”

Orihime nodded. “It’s ok, I’ll come. Do you want to take Spot to the bay? I think he’d like to go swimming.” 

“I’ll stay for a while,” Ichigo said and lifted his beer as an explanation. Toshiro gave him another dirty look before the other high schoolers left.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to cause,” Renji pointed to the direction the others had left, “any kind of flight _en masse_.”

“No worries. Toshiro may pout for a while, he’s so young he’s living in a different world than the rest of us. He’ll come around. He has to, there is no one else of his age. Wow I’m happy I didn’t get moved up any classes.”

“Are you saying someone offered you the chance?”

Ichigo laughed. Renji found himself relaxing when they spoke. Maybe it was because they had met in the football field, or maybe it was that they both _felt_. Maybe Ichigo was simply young and inexperienced, and Renji didn’t have to watch his words with him as much as with the university students. 

Time ran fast. Renji could see uni students further down the beach, but he didn’t see anyone he knew well. So he stayed with Ichigo. They ate the remaining food and Renji finished beer after beer. The sun was setting.

“Don’t you have some hour you have to be back home?” Renji asked, hearing the slight slur in his voice but not caring about it. “We never see any high schoolers out here this late.”

Ichigo was watching the spectrum of yellows to oranges painting the sky where it met the sea. He shrugged. “I don’t. Those who live in the dormitories do, but I live in an apartment. Hot as a stove right now. I bet I could bake a cake in the kitchen sink.”

Renji laughed. “Same here. If it were any hotter in my place I’d open a smokehouse in there and start selling some fucking ham. You’re fun, do you want another beer?”

Renji picked up two cans. The first, he threw to Ichigo, who caught it, but just barely. That spoke more of the throw than Ichigo’s catching skills.

“Thanks, but you’re getting drunk. Maybe you don’t want to have another.”

If Ichigo was being judgmental, Renji didn’t hear it in his voice or see it on his face. The boy sounded and looked like someone who was simply stating a fact.

Renji opened his can and took a long sip. 

“Happens that I do want another. I’m sick of my friends who stay home when I need them. I can’t even find Rangiku, not that I tried too hard. I’m bored and tired and I plan to drink myself to sleep. I’m so fucking tired of watching everything go to shit. But you,” it was dawning on Renji that he was about to lose control of the sudden rant, and he should close his big mouth asap.

“But you, Ichigo, you are a good kid. I knew that when I saw you at the football field. Sometimes I just know things like that and I bet you know some things too.”

Suddenly, Ichigo looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else. Like in a dentist’s appointment, having his wisdom teeth surgically removed, with the dentist asking for an instrument to cut the tooth to pieces inside his jaw.

“You aren’t too bad either, but I’m not so that good that I’d carry you home.”

“I don’t give a shit. I’m sick and tired of having to stay in that hole. It’s so hot, I’ll go nuts. I’ll just sleep here on the beach, and if she comes back here and stabs me, I’ll fucking welcome her.”

“She,” Ichigo repeated. It wasn’t even a question, and despite being drunk, Renji knew he had said way too much already. His treacherous mouth, however, wasn’t done speaking. 

He told Ichigo of his childhood in the childrens’ home, of how Rukia had disappeared, and how Momo had seen a dead man. 

The worst part was when he spoke of feeling, and how no one ever spoke of it, and how tired he was from having to keep it all inside him.

When he finally stopped, he was drunk enough not to remember Ichigo’s reaction in detail afterwards. He was sure it hadn’t been spectacular. Had it been, he’d have remembered.

Apparently, something in that long rant however hit home, because Ichigo turned out to be kind enough to see Renji home. Ichigo’s home, that was, not Renji’s.

The rest of the night wasn’t pleasant for Renji. He hated going to sleep when drunk; his dreams were unpleasant, and he kept waking up and feeling sweaty and nauseous. The hours passed slowly. As he sobered up, sleeping should have gotten easier, but the early morning sun started to shine right into Ichigo’s living room, and directly onto the sofa where Renji was trying to sleep.

The temperature got worse with the rising sun. Renji was thirsty, but didn’t want to clatter his way through Ichigo’s kitchen. 

Soon, his mouth felt like Sahara. He decided that if Ichigo didn’t want to be awakened by random noise, he shouldn't have invited Renji in.

The kitchen was small, but practical and unusually clean, which wasn’t something Renji would’ve expected from a high school kid living alone. He however appreciated the lack of clutter. Ichigo slept mere meters from the kitchen, in the alcove separated from rest of the apartment by only a curtain. Clattering of dirty glasses and plates would’ve woken the kid up for sure, if Renji had to make his way through them.

Renji felt like he was more or less alive again after drinking two pints of water. He returned to the sofa and noticed it was, technically speaking, a love seat. Nevertheless, he fell asleep and slept for a while before having to properly deal with the oh-so-cruel world.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Umm, I don't know if I have that much to say about this chapter, other than I had fun writing it. I usually struggle with Ichigo, probably because his super-shinigami position in canon makes it difficult for me to balance stuff. But as we are in the land of AU, I didn't have to worry about spiritual pressure and things went great with him.

“Yo, sleepy-head!”

The words both woke up and startled Renji. Right after he knew where and when he was, the hellish temperature, thirst and anxiety overtook him.

The wound stung with sweat, and Renji could only hope nothing bad had happened to the stitches. The situation wouldn’t be improved by him bleeding on the sofa.

“You have a headache?” Ichigo asked with amusement.

“I’ve lived through worse. FYI, you could have just told me to go home.”

Ichigo shrugged. “Looked like you needed company. I’m about to make breakfast. I have bread, muesli and bacon. You want some?”

Renji, who was ready to shovel grease from the pan, immediately felt slightly better.

“Give me four slices if you don’t mind,” he said, being too polite to ask for as much as Ichigo could give. “Thanks.”

“Ok. I have ice too, if you want ice water. I don’t have juice, though, it’s so damn expensive and heavy to carry home.”

Renji followed Ichigo to the kitchen and downed a pint of lukewarm water. Then he dropped ice cubes into the pint and filled it again.

“I’m sorry to keep demanding, but do you have coffee?”

Ichigo shook his head, much to Renji’s disappointment.

“I prefer tea. I don’t even have a coffeemaker. Budget reasons, I think you know those.”

“Only too well.”

Gone was the chance to have coffee with the morning cigarette. The thought of dragging his carcass out just for smoking suddenly felt like too much work. He should be heading home anyway.

Just the thought of being in his small and overly hot apartment upped his anxiety level a notch or two. 

Fan-fucking-tastic. This was one of the reasons drinking had lost much of its fun for him. Age had made him anxious and depressed when hungover. 

He had to find something to do.

“Do you have something planned for today?” he asked Ichigo. “I’ll buy you coffee, or if you want, I’ll make it tea.”

Ichigo gave him a strange look.

“I mean as thanks. I’m not asking out as a date, if that’s how it sounded.”

Ichigo laughed. “I promised I’d take Spot out. Tatsuki’s dog, that is. She has some karate thing and Orihime some choir thing, and their apartment is as hot as this. Tag along if you want, might be less boring than going alone.”

“What time are you going?”

“After I eat, but if you want, I can wait for you to pick some things from home. Or to change clothes, or something.”

Renji wanted to go home, shower and, Ichigo had guessed right, change his clothes. On the other hand, he really didn’t want to go home.

“No need, I’ll swim in the sea.”

The wound better be in good enough condition to face salt water, because salt water it was going to face. Renji imagined he had almost-visible stink field of stale sweat and old alcohol hanging around him.

After they finished breakfast, Ichigo and Renji left to pick up Spot. Tatsuki and Orihime lived reasonably close to Ichigo, a kilometer, maybe one and a half between their apartments. Renji had always thought the place was a dormitory building. 

Ichigo had the key, so he could enter the house without hassle, even when Orihime and Tatsuki were gone. When he opened the door, a spotted dog enthusiastically greeted them.

After finishing with Ichigo, Spot started to sniff Renji, who somewhat liked the small animal.

“What’s the breed?” he asked.

“English Springer Spaniel.”

Renji knelt and offered his hand for the dog to sniff and lick. ”I can see where the name comes from.”

Ichigo nodded. ”That, but his papers say Saint Patric’s something something, I don’t remember the whole thing. The two first letters were there, so he got stuck with that. I think he likes you.” 

“I like him too,” Renji admitted. “When I was younger I thought I’d get a dog when I moved out. Then there were landlords and such, and I never got to it. You are allowed to have pets in the dorms somehow?”

“If it’s ok with your roommates. Spot practically belongs both of them, so that wasn’t an issue. This place is more like apartments than dorms anyway.”

Renji wanted to ask if Orihime and Tatsuki were roommates or a couple, but that didn’t seem appropriate. “How so?” he asked instead.

“They have a kitchen and a bathroom, but some old lady sees over everyone and there is a meal hall and hanging space upstairs,” Ichigo explained while going through a coat rack. 

He found a bag full of dog supplies and picked up a leash. Spot went wild in split second.

“Oh for fuck’s... Sit, Spot! Sit!”

Spot sat, for about another split second. Ichigo didn’t have time to attach the leash before the dog was up and moving again.

“Fuck”, Ichigo half-repeated. “Renji, there is a water bottle in that bag. Can you fill it? I’ll try to catch this monster... Spot, sit.”

Renji found the bottle with little effort, and opened what he guessed was a bathroom door. His guess was a correct one, and he turned the tap on. He ran the tap for a while to get cold water, and was just about to fill the bottle when he heard something so unexpected it made him drop the bottle. It hit the sink, and then clattered on the floor.

The tap was running. Spot’s panting and restless steps accompanied with Ichigo’s low swearing muffled by the door. Under the everyday noise was a melody.

It was faint and sad, like an old music box. It was also familiar to Renji. In his younger days he had kept hearing the same melody, hidden in the hum of computers, in the buzz of distant traffic, or the idle chatter of public spaces.

He stood still for a while, doubting his hearing. The melody continued, but did nothing else – it didn’t get slower, like melodies from old music boxes did, nor it pick pace or change volume. It simply was.

Not knowing what else to do, Renji bent down to pick the bottle. It was plastic and, to his relief, undamaged. Most of his attention however lingered with the music, which became faint when he was close to floor, and then grew stronger when he straightened his pose. There was no obvious item for the melody to originate, if not inside the bathroom cabinet.

The bathroom door was closed. There was no reason for him not to open the cabinet.

It was full of everyday items. A bunch of carefully folded towels of different colors. Sanitary pads and tampons. A box of washing powder. A pale yellow toothbrush. 

There was no mechanism of any sort. Renji could more feel than hear that the melody came from the toothbrush. 

He stared for a brief while and closed the cabinet door without touching anything in it, in remote fear that he’d somehow get caught. He proceeded with filling Spot’s bottle, and tried to will his heart to beat slower. It felt like a hummingbird had made a nest in his chest.

When Renji opened the bathroom door and stepped out, Ichigo had managed to attach Spot’s leash to the collar. The boy panted as much as the dog.

“His training,” Ichigo said, “is kind of,” he made a pause to breath, “a work in,” breathing pause, “progress.”

Renji said he understood. Ichigo explained further that Spot wasn’t even two years old and was going through some kind of dog teenage years. Renji cracked some half-assed joke about the two teenagers in his company. Ichigo didn’t seem to mind.

* * *

By the evening, Renji was tired, but wonderfully hangover-free. He was also happy about the budding friendship. The two of them hadn’t discussed about what was going on, in the larger scheme of things, but Renji felt he could speak freely around Ichigo, if need to be.

Ichigo was just a kid, but a man could never have too much friends. 

After spending a couple hours between the four familiar walls, Renji felt his newly-found contentment dissipating. The temperature indoors was like a woolen blanket over his head. The cool shower he took only made the blanket wet.

The moisture crept from the bathroom almost like a living thing. Heat was never dry on the School Island, but the apartment was in tropical conditions.

The pattern of thoughts Renji had been able to keep away for the day fell back into its track.

He opened his box of miscellaneous electronics and picked the earphones up. Whenever he’d do whatever he was going to do with them, he’d start by cleaning the blood out. With the blood gone, they wouldn’t be suspicious at all. 

Then he’d throw them away. Or maybe he’d keep them for a while just to be sure.

Cleaning the earphones turned to be easy. In most places the dry flakes fell almost by touch, as if the plastic repelled all dirt. What remained, Renji cleaned away with toiletpaper and cotton pads. 

The result was surprisingly good. The bright orange shone as if new. The headband was clean, and so was the serial or model number pressed on it. 46692, but no visible manufacturer name or logo.

Renji flushed the paper and cotton pads, and stopped to admire the earphones, or rather the work he had done on them. Even cleaned, they didn’t look especially interesting, but touching them made Renji feel good. The sensation danced in his spine, pleasure like a long-lasting electric shock.

He had tampered the crime scene, and he was getting away with it.

A sudden impulse to try the headphones on took over him, and he gave in. The previous owner was dead. What about it? The dead man wasn’t going to miss any audio or other device. Renji had gone through all the work of cleaning the earphones, so it was only right if he tested them. The sound quality had better be heavenly. There was no other excuse to buy or wear anything so ugly.

Renji placed the muffs on his ears and connected the cord to his phone. It played a new random song, some techno that mattered little to Renji. The sound quality wasn’t even that good, but for no reason he could even begin to understand he was starting to feel good – no, not starting, intense pleasure took over him in waves he wouldn’t been able to control even if he wanted to. 

He felt fantastic. It was better than the best orgasm he had ever had, better than being drunk for the first time, better than doing heroin. It felt like true happiness.

Renji had sworn off opiates after an experience not unlike what he was feeling. The drug had diminished all his sorrows and diluted his fears, making him decide the price was too high in the long run.

There were no drugs this time, only the bright-colored earphones, and the hope they symbolized.

They had belonged to the dead man, now they belonged to him. He’d call Shuhei next day, Renji decided before falling asleep later that evening. Shuhei played Warhammer and presumably had all kinds of paints for the miniatures. Black background and deep red tribals would solve the problem with fugliness, and make the earphones much less recognizable.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had h-u-g-e difficulties with this chapter. Menos Grande sized issues.
> 
> Thanks of similar size to polynya, who sorted much of it out!

Of all days of the week, Sunday was the Renji’s least favorite. The problem was that Monday loomed so tormentingly close. Sunday was the day he had to do stuff for real, those things he should have done earlier in the week.

Week after week, Sunday was the day that life hit him hard in the face. Once he made it to Monday, one of the mornings had already gone by, and few things ended up as being as unpleasant as he had anticipated.

Starting was the hardest part, Renji told himself for umpteenth time. On this beautiful late Sunday afternoon, he had dragged himself to a computer lab, where he was sitting and staring at the screen. The project work he was trying to do hadn't progressed since Friday. If the course hadn’t been a mandatory one, he’d simply give up already.

He read the same line for a third time and yawned. He had brought a thermos full of black coffee with him, but it was already empty.

The report was about a page shorter than it had been when he started working.

Renji decided to buy a cup of coffee from the automate. He’d stop to smoke on the way, and then he’d start working for real.

At the main entrance Renji was greeted by hot air and sunshine so bright that it stung on the black of his tattoos and made his eyes water. He half-muttered lazy curses against the weather, but when he turned to the smoking place, he almost forgot the temperature. A familiar young woman sat in the best shade she could find, her arms around her knees. There was something horribly sad in her posture.

“Rangiku?” Renji said without even raising his voice. The whole yard was empty, save the two of them, and she had probably heard his steps already.

“Hi,” Rangiku answered. Her voice was so quiet Renji read the word from her lips rather than heard it. She was smiling, but the smile was empty of feeling. A mask of sorts, he thought.

“You didn’t answer your phone,” Rangiku continued when Renji was even closer. Her voice was a quiet monotone that strangely lacked emotion. “I figured you’d be at school, which means you’d be in here sooner or later. Smoking, I mean. I waited.”

“Huh.” Renji didn’t know if he was more irritated by someone knowing his routine that well, or surprised by Rangiku reaching out to him.

“I forgot it at home and thought that no one would call me. What are you doing here?”

“My cousin is dead.”

“Your cousin?” Renji echoed in surprise. He couldn’t even remember the name of Rangiku’s cousin. They had never met, but it didn’t take too long for his brain to start to get ahold of what Rangiku was saying.  
The cousin in question had to be the son on Rangiku’s mother’s brother. If Renji had understood correctly, pre-teen Rangiku had moved to her uncle’s house after her mother’s remarriage to a violent man. Which made the cousin more like a brother.

Shit, shit, fuck, shit…

“Gin,” Rangiku filled in the name, cutting off Renji’s mental exercise in profanity before it had time to properly take off. Then she confirmed that perhaps a stream of curses was called for, after all. 

“He was murdered, here on the island. I don’t even know what he was doing here. He didn’t even call, I didn’t know he was here. I --”

Renji never found out what else she did or didn’t know. The monotone broke into sobs and tears, and he could no longer make out the words. Without knowing what to do, he just stood in place, listening and fiddling the edge of his cigarette box.

It probably didn’t even matter if he understood what she was saying, he thought, as long as he was there to listen.

Rangiku cried for some time. Two students, probably a couple, walked past them and gave long looks towards the smoking area, but Renji stared back and neither spoke.

“Sorry to bother you,” she finally said, when she managed through the crying.

“I don’t have too many friends to talk to, and Momo,” Rangiku sobbed, almost losing her ability to speak again, “saw him dead.”

“No worries, Ran. Let’s get my stuff from the computer lab, you can come to my place. It’s not too far and no one’s going to bother us.”

“Thanks.” She sounded at least as sad as she looked. “I hope I’m not interrupting too much.”

Honesty probably wasn’t the best policy. “Dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s. I’ll get back to it sometime tomorrow.”

* * *

“How on earth can you sleep in here?” Rangiku asked when they entered Renji’s apartment. She had calmed down as they walked. Her voice was back to the monotone.

“Poorly. Fans were sold out. I’ll just have to survive until the next shipment.”

Rangiku didn’t answer. She looked around the apartment and the clutter it had collected during the past few days. Renji thanked his luck he had hid the earphones. He hadn’t had time to do the paintwork yet, and Rangiku might have recognized them.

“Do you want something?” He offered, mostly to break the silence and to stop thinking the earphones. “Tea, coffee?”

“Too hot.”

“Juice, ice water?”

Rangiku shrugged. “Ice water, thanks. I’ll have a glass to cry into.”

Renji was starting to find her tone extremely creepy. It did not belong to the Rangiku he knew, and he wished he could’ve offered a beer or something to loosen her up. He didn’t have any, though, having forgotten the leftovers on the beach.

“When did you hear?” he asked, dropping the ice cubes in two glasses and filling them with water. No point in delaying the unavoidable.

“Yesterday evening. It took some time before they even found out who he was. He didn’t have any ID and no one missed him yet, he lives alone these days. My uncle called me just before the cops did.”

“The cops?”

“They wanted to hear if I knew anything. I don’t, I didn’t even know he was coming. I just can’t understand. Why didn’t he say anything? What was he doing here?”

Tears welled up in her eyes. When she blinked, they fell on her cheeks. It wasn’t an especially beautiful sight, her eyes puffy from crying, and what little makeup she’d been wearing smudged all over her face, but Renji found himself liking Rangiku more than he ever had.

He handed her the ice water without saying anything. She held the glass for a while and looked like she’d start to properly cry at any second, but there was anger in her, too.

“I can’t help but think he died because of me!”

Renji nodded and tried to remember if he had napkins, and if he did, where he had placed them. 

“Gin was always so kind to me!” She was half-yelling, half-crying now. “They didn’t even take his money, no chance in hell it was some random hit, the only thing taken was his earphones. What kind of an asshole kills someone over some fucking earphones?”

So, the police knew of the earphones. It just kept getting better and better.

“He was a brother to me,” Rangiku continued, her voice finally breaking into sobs.

The tissues were in the medicine cabinet. Not the most logical of places, but that was where he had seen them.

“Tell me about him,” Renji asked. The medicine cabinet was only few steps away. He forced himself to focus on it and the tissues. There was no room for poor choice of words or ill-considered movement.

When he gave the napkins to to Rangiku, she started speaking.

The stories she told, crying at points and laughing at others, were at best loosely connected and often didn’t make much sense to Renji. He didn’t know the people in them, or the places. 

It probably made listening easier, but not easy. He spent much of the time staring the table and toying with his glass.

Then, suddenly, she was done with speaking. The two of them sat in silence for a while.

“Thanks for listening,” Rangiku said. She was back using that horrible monotone again. “You are always so nice to me, the real me. Sometimes I think the girls think I’m a cum-dumpster or something, and the men want to make me one.”

The sudden words made Renji jump. He was starting to think that Rangiku’s state had more in it than a dead cousin. Not to say it wasn’t enough of a reason. He himself was probably still a bit fucked up because of Rukia, and that had been a long time ago. Until recently, of course.

The silence dragged on. Thinking nothing and everything at once, Renji concluded that every chance to continue the project work was gone. He wouldn’t have thought himself as being close to Rangiku to any meaningful degree, but she had decided to speak to him. If someone needed him, truly him and not just an able body fit for lifting heavy things, he wanted to be there.

Besides, the professor would probably be sympathetic if Renji explained why the work was late.

It wasn’t long after that when Rangiku kissed him without much warning. He had some initial difficulty deciding what to do, but then he did what many men would have: he kissed her back.

A moment or two later they had freed themselves from all clothing. Rangiku leaned over him, on Renji’s cheap mattress. her blond locks fell on his face almost as golden as the tiny flakes in her pendant, the one Gin had given to her. The pendant moved back and forth, so hypnotic Renji couldn’t look away from the flock of specks, circling in the bottle, never falling, glowing gold in the dim of the room.

* * *

Renji woke up so early it was practically still nighttime. He felt hot and thirsty, which wasn’t helped by Rangiku sleeping next to him. He couldn’t even get water without waking her up. 

He tried to fall asleep again, but ended watching Rangiku. She wasn’t the first woman Renji had woken up next to, not even the first one he didn’t want to have a relationship with, but this time he felt guilty. Had he taken advantage of her?

There was no undoing what he had done, but he’d do his best to be there for her. He’d wait for her to wake up, and then he’d wait as long as it took before she decided to leave for home. If it took an hour, or a day, or a week, it didn’t matter.

The night shifted to morning, the morning to the day. The midday had passed before Renji was awakened again, this time by Rangiku’s movement.

“What’s the time?” she asked, yawning. Her eyes were still swollen and she hadn’t washed the smudged make up away, but she was beautiful.

Renji didn’t have to look at a clock. Lines of light shone into the room through the small holes of the cardboard window-shades. He had seen the lines so many times he could tell the time by them.

“More than twelve, close to one, I think. What do you want for breakfast? I can make some. The options are kind of limited though.”

“I’ll start with a shower and a bucketful of cold water,” she said, huffing. The monotone was gone, she sounded like herself again. “Shouldn’t you be at school?”

“Can’t bother all the time, I’m skipping. There’s clean towels in the cupboard, pick any you like.”

“Thanks. Do you want to join me?”

That was the worry number one in Renji’s mind, Rangiku thinking they’d become an item. Worry number two was that if she wasn’t blind and stupid, and she was neither, she had noticed the wound and the stitches.

“Listen Ran, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking yesterday. You probably weren’t after any one night thing.” 

Rangiku shook her head. She didn’t seem overly sad, but not a bit surprised either. “Don’t get your panties in a twist over it

That solved worry number one, but Renji didn’t have time to feel relieved. Rangiku’s voice developed a new edge, when she continued: “But what the hell happened to you?”

“What do you mean?” At best, he was buying time.

“I’m a blond, not an idiot. Cough it out.”

“I dropped a knife. It wasn’t too deep or anything so I figured I’d save money and stitch it myself.”

“Bullshit.”

Anyone in Rangiku’s place deserved the truth. Renji wanted to give it, but didn’t know if he’d dare to speak it. Rukia, Gin’s earphones… At least the dead man had a name now, but that didn’t help him one bit at the moment. He had no answer, except the truth, and the silence was getting way too long.

“Someone slashed me,” he admitted, and could almost hear Rangiku’s thoughts running wild. Best to elaborate before she had time to ask.

“I’m fairly sure it was the person who killed your cousin, but I didn’t see it. It was afterwards. I didn’t know it at the time, of course.”

Ragiku’s eyes widened, but for Renji’s relief she looked more surprised than scared. “Why didn’t you report it? Or go to see a doctor?”

Explaining Rukia and everything else that had happened during that night was impossible. Renji hadn’t quite been able to explain it to himself. But a half-truth was surprisingly easy to utter. 

“When I said afterwards, I meant like immediately afterwards, before even Momo was there. I was drunk and mildly high and freaked out of my mind, not rational at all. It was me who took those damn earphones, just grabbed them for no sane reason. I didn’t even know they were his before you said so, they were just lying there, like, away from him.” 

“What the hell, Renji?” Rangiku’s surprise was quickly and visibly making room for anger and, maybe, for fear. “You saw the guy! Or...”

“I didn’t do it, I swear through whatever is holy!”  
“You do know how it sounds?”

Renji nodded. “That’s why I didn’t say anything when I sobered up. That’s why you can’t say anything to anyone. Please don’t, it would just make things worse and slow when they’d waste their time with me. I don’t know anything, except that I took the earphones.”

“He stabbed you and you didn’t see anything?”

“No.” She was being too smart for Renji’s liking. “Yes, I mean it was dark and I was freaked out. It could’ve been a fucking Frankenstein's monster and I wouldn’t know.” 

“I still think you should speak to the cops.”

Despite her words, Rangiku seemed to believe Renji. He could no longer see fear or anger in her. Maybe there was even a touch of hope around her eyes?

He nodded. It wasn’t a promise. If Rangiku took it as one, it wasn’t his fault.

“I’m taking that shower now,” she stated, accepting the answer.

When it was Renji’s turn to shower, he learnt she had used most of the warm water. He didn’t mind much.

He had lied plenty during the morning, but his statement of the limited breakfast options had been hundred percent truthful. They managed breakfast, or brunch, the time considered. While they ate, Rangiku asked Renji not to tell anyone the dead man’s identity. He was happy to promise – he had been just a kid when Rukia had gone, but he remembered the pity in others’ eyes, the soulless condolences and, when he had been older, how carefully people had avoided the topic around him. He still hated every second of it.

When Rangiku started getting ready to leave, she even gave Renji a small but genuine smile.

“Take care,” she said. 

“You too.”

The door closed, and Renji was left alone to think how he’d like to spend the rest of the day. Going to school didn’t make much sense, as almost all of the lectures had ended already. The heat made him lose what little interest he had in making excuses for his late project.

Later, he tried to work on it, but focusing on the task was difficult. He was simply too restless. Too hungry, too. His thoughts kept wandering to the food situation. He had been hoping he could manage , preferably until Tuesday, when he’d be able to buy that stupid fan for sure. Not eating at school, however, meant he’d be soon eating plain corn flour at home.

Maybe the shipment had arrived early? 

Ha! That was ungrounded optimism. The only thing ever known to arrive fast to the School Island was the flu.

He started making a shopping list, which grew lengthy. He was already wearing one shoe, but not the other when he remembered there were some frozen vegetables in the freezer. They alone didn’t make a much a meal, but he didn’t really care at the moment. Shopping trip cancelled.

The lower the sun set, the tinier the apartment felt. Hotter, too, but that was probably an objective truth. Cheerful sounds of fellow students carried in from an open window, all of them contradicting his bleak mood. He tried to cover the voices with music, but happy hollering and bouts of laugher appeared to echo from the concrete walls of the building and gain volume.

Soon after they started to echo inside his skull as well. He was going to have a migraine, that was becoming sure.

He took his meds and started waiting. 

The pills didn’t seem to do much. Despite liberal dosing, his head was pounding, the familiar angry zigzag shape danced inside his closed lids. The light that escaped in the room despite the window-shade was blinding. The nausea was the worst of it, though. If he moved so much as his little finger, or an eyeball, the constant feeling of being about to be sick increased tenfold.

When smell of smoke and cooking food began to mix into what little fresh air came in through the window, Renji simply gave up. He reached for his old MP3-player, and almost unwillingly plugged his new earphones into it. Fighting against the nausea he dragged himself into the bathroom, took off his clothes and ran cold water all over the floor.

The bathroom was the coolest, darkest room in the apartment. The floor was hard to lie on, but soft things were for when he felt better. The walls and the quiet music he played helped to keep most of the noise out, and if he’d been able to do something about the zigzag, that old bitch who liked to torture him when he was at his weakest, he thought he might’ve felt almost like a human being. That alone, he thought, was almost worth the euphoria he had felt before. Almost, but no quite.

After what felt like a long time, he fell asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may or may not have noticed, I missed an update. I was traveling without my computer and got back at Sunday.

The noise was quickly becoming infernal. Renji could hear it before he was even properly awake. First a thud, then rattling. Someone was banging the apartment door, but why, and why were they using a battering ram, when the apartment had a fully functional doorbell?

Renji swore under his breath and sat up. The movement jerked the earphone cord. The MP3 player fell from the sink edge where Renji had placed it to keep it safe from moisture on the floor. The battery was dead.

The migraine was gone – for the second time, but this time it would stay gone. The uncomfortable restlessness had faded, making room for an unfamiliar but pleasant needle-sharp focus.

The noise at the door was gaining volume. Renji took the earphones off and stuck them in the laundry bin. Then he switched the lights on.

The fluorescent lamp gave pale artificial light, hard and raw in comparison with the natural dim leaking in from the transom. Eyes squinting, Renji found a towel and wrapped it around him, high enough to hide the wound.

The floor was completely dry. How long had he slept?

His muscles and joints felt sore. A quick glance to the mirror showed a face that would be greatly improved by shaving, and hair that was a mess.

The banging on the door was more demanding than combing up, and Renji answered it. He opened the door wearing only the towel.

“Renji!” Momo cried out. If she was greeting or scolding wasn’t overly clear. “We thought something bad had happened. Are you ok?”

She had brought Izuru, who was standing next to her, and Shuhei, whose face was strangely serious. Renji closed his eyes in confusion. When he opened them, nothing had changed. Even the confusion remained. 

“I’m good. Why didn’t you call or something? Come in, if you like.”

“We called, 20 times or more,” Momo explained when the trio stepped in. “It didn’t connect. Every call went directly to the voice mail.”

“We rang the doorbell,” Shuhei continued, “but you didn’t open.”  
“Then we stood out some time and thought we’d call the landlord. Then some guy came out and let us in the corridor,” Izuru completed the story.

Renji couldn’t hide a touch of irritation. “What’s the worry? Just because I don’t call back in seconds doesn’t mean I’m dead or disappeared.”

Izuru and Momo looked at each other. It was one of those looks Renji couldn’t stomach. Two people clearly completing each other, speaking without words.

“Renji,” that was Momo the Mother Hen, “do you know what day today is?”

“Monday… No, Tuesday.”

Izuru shook his head. “Wednesday. We’ve been trying to call you since yesterday, when you didn’t show in two days a row.”

The irritation melted away. Had he really managed to lose a day?

No, not quite. He had gone to sleep on Sunday evening, and woken on Monday, wonderfully free of headache but not the aura. The migraine had hit him again in the evening, this time with full force. After that point, he had some vague memories of being awake, and even eating microwaved frozen vegetables before puking them out, but there was still missing time.

A fuckload of missing time.

“So we were worried,” Shuhei concluded rather pointlessly. Renji was starting to realize he was staring like a moron.

“You didn’t do anything stupid, did you? Or get hurt or something?”

“What? No, sorry,” Renji came to his senses. “There was some personal stuff on Monday, I was kinda needed. Then I had two migraines, and that’s it. You know how strangely time runs when you’re feeling miserable. What did I miss in school?”

Momo nodded. The worried frown didn’t leave her face. “That’s why I tried to call you the first time. Only one of four or so turned the project work in. The teacher was really angry.”

Izuru picked up the thread. “He said, and I almost quote, that he’ll give us until Wednesday morning. After that, nothing short of own death is a valid reason to hand it in late again. Momo said there was no grade next to your ID number.”

Renji grimaced, but didn’t feel overly bad about the course. “There’s always the next year, right? Hey, I’ll take a shower. Make some coffee, will you? Two cups for me.”

After they had coffee and made sure Renji was safe and sane, Momo, Izuru and Shuhei didn’t stay for long. Momo, of course, made sure that Renji kept his phone on, and the Izuru knew where the spare key to the apartment was.

Renji agreed, mostly because he knew it was the easiest way to make Momo happy, but he found he didn’t oppose the idea much. Waking up on the bathroom floor just to find out he had lost time was not something with which he had any experience. That is, without him knowing why the time was missing.

He felt pretty normal, though, if not better than usual. The two cups of coffee had erased what little headache lingered, and he enjoyed being able to focus again.

Had normal felt this good a week ago?

His thoughts were flowing clear as mountain streams. Even the colors around him had newly defined strength. When Renji put his coffee cup in the sink, the glaze felt smooth under his fingers.

He needed time to think, time to make decisions more important than the group work and the course he was ditching. 

It was time figure out how he could find Rukia.

She’d make it all make perfect sense.

His mind occupied by the problem, Renji let his body do some overdue cleaning. Clothes lay wherever he had dropped them, dust bunnies were breeding under the furniture, and the pile of dirty dishes was getting too high to be steady.

When Renji poured dishwashing soap into the sink, two small, citron-fresh bubbles escaped from the bottle. They hovered above the sink for a moment, their colors bright as pixie wings. When they broke, tiniest shreds of soap fell into the sink.

The dishwater and brush cleaned plates, glasses and forks almost by themselves. 

Renji made his decision. 

He’d talk to Ichigo.

Not to Momo, who had never taken the feeling with any seriousness, and would only work herself up. Not to Izuru, who’d tell Momo.

Not to Shuhei, who was… just too much Shuhei, serious and oh so overly responsible despite his relaxed manner.

Not to Rangiku (especially not to Rangiku), who had enough on her plate as it was, and who most certainly didn’t want to find her cousin’s killer just to hug her.

It was a simple process of elimination. Besides, Renji had babbled some of it to him already, and as far as he knew, Ichigo hadn’t called the cops.

Right after placing the now-washed dishes in their proper places, Renji picked the phone up.

The call was answered soon: “Hi.”  
The voice was carefree and not very focused, like Ichigo had been doing something and was still thinking of it. Renji could hear low hum through the line. The lucky bastard had bought a fan. 

Renji hoped the shipment had been large enough to be not sold out just yet.

“Hi, what’re you doing? I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important.”

“I’m learning how the weather gets created in the troposphere. Geography. Boring like you wouldn’t believe.”

Renji laughed a little. “I remember, damn, I’m happy I’m done with it. I sucked at it, it was a small miracle I learned to place myself on the map… Although motivation may have affected the grade. I called to ask what you’re going to do tomorrow, after school? I thought we could walk to the cliffs.”

He could have sworn he heard Ichigo raising his eyebrows. The cliffs were the most remote place on the School Island, a place not truly far away but difficult enough of a walk to feel distant. There were no proper paths, and the climb was, at best, a trod through thickets of various kinds. The view was not bad, but it was generally agreed that it was not worth it either.

“The wind might be cool,” Renji bluffed.

“Are you serious? There are trillions of mosquitos and horseflies in the woods in this weather, and when we climb up all sweaty, they’ll all be trying to snack on us...” Ichigo’s voice trailed when he was getting close to the finish. Renji could tell he was hesitating.

“But,” Ichigo decided, “if you want to go, I can come. Our school finishes at 12 tomorrow, the teacher got heat exhaustion today and some hours got canceled. Is that ok for you?”

Renji agreed. He should be at Material Mechanics study session at 12, and at 2 pm he should be feverishly copying the correct answer in math.

He was starting to feel like ditching both, the math and the M&M.

He congratulated himself by enrolling for Thermodynamics laboratory work course. He liked the lab work. Thermodynamics, not so much.

* * *

The climb was steep and dotted with jagged rocks. It was steeper and the terrain more difficult than Renji remembered. More mosquitos and horseflies swarmed around him than he cared to count. The experience was made complete by him stepping in a wasp’s nest, which cost him six aching stings. Ichigo would have been saved by his envy-inducing ability to sprint despite the terrain, had he not stopped to laugh.

The wasp incident aside, Ichigo had been quiet and reserved. Renji guessed the boy understood that they weren’t climbing up just to enjoy the nature.

He had no difficulty in understanding Ichigo’s nervousness. If he had remembered how much work the walk was, he’d have suggested meeting at the docks, or his own apartment, or maybe in Ichigo’s. Or… Who even was interested in what he had to say to the high schooler?

When they made their way through the last patch of loose rocks, Renji let out a sigh of relief. They had arrived on the highest point of the School Island. It was a small area of flat stone, the rock worn smooth by millenia of rain, snow and ice. Lichen and moss clung on where the rock had chipped, and trees died young due to winds and lack of soil. The gray, barkless stunts remained next to an ancient and scrubby but, surprisingly, alive pine tree.

Renji sat down, leaned his back on the pine and let his heavy breathing calm.

The actual cliffs, a drop of fifty or so meters directly into the sea, was only couple of meters away.

Ichigo sat next to Renji and drank mineral water, which he had wisely brought with him. After he was done, he gave the bottle to Renji, who felt slightly ashamed for not bringing anything to drink. He drank the water, and could taste the minerals. The breeze carried a touch of sea, a smell that was slightly salty but mostly that of rotting kelp and fish. Apparently, it was low tide.

Renji lit a smoke and closed his eyes for a while. The breeze on his face and the sound of waves breaking on the rocks under the cliffs brought back memories or, rather, an echo of a memory. Sometimes the past was a difficult thing to grasp properly.

They sat in silence. Ichigo threw a pebble into the sea. Every winter ate the rock smaller, water turning to ice in the cracks. But now the stone was warm, almost hot, and the sunshine so bright Renji had to squint his eyes when he looked to the sea. He could hear seagulls. They nested on an islet close to School Island, although the chick of the summer past had matured some time ago.

When the cigarette was about to end, Renji took a new one and lit it from the old one. He offered one to Ichigo, who shook his head.

“Thanks, but I don’t smoke,” he said and threw another pebble into the sea.

Renji didn’t know what to say, and didn’t say anything.

The silence was one of those that happened when people tried to figure out how to say the things they wanted to, and the listeners-to-be wanted them to change the subject as soon as possible.

The second cigarette ended, and there weren’t too many pebbles left for throwing.

“Listen, Ichigo,” Renji began, but rest of the words somewhat got stuck in his throat.

“Just say what you have to say.”

Renji took a deep breath. “I know you, you know, _feel_ things like I do. That’s why I’m talking to you. You don’t think it’s just imagination. I want to find Rukia. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“That childhood friend of yours, who disappeared?” Ichigo asked. He wasn’t one to smile, but now he was scowling and staring out at the sea. There was nothing to watch, spare the ever-present seagulls.

“Who else would I be trying to find?” The words came harsher than Renji had intended. He wondered briefly if the boy was playing dumb on purpose, but softened his tone. “That’s not what I meant to ask, though.”

“I think I know what you mean, kind of,” Ichigo said.

“My mom is dead,” he continued after a moment. “You shouldn’t involve yourself with any of it. Nothing good ever comes with this. What you feel is your instinct of self-preservation telling you to run like hell.”

Renji took a second to think. Ichigo was making sense, and a lot of it. Fear had its own evolutionary function, which was discourage poking around places and things that were awfully scary. But Renji had been involved since that day in the laundry room. Gin’s death was only a catalyst, something to get things moving faster towards what was inevitable. 

“But Rukia isn’t dead,” Renji pointed out. He was being heard, maybe even understood. That alone made him feel stronger. “Are you seriously trying to say I should just bury my head in the sand?”

Still staring to the sea, Ichigo elbowed him. He didn’t use much force, but enough to make the wound hurt. Sudden pain made Renji yelp.

“Hey!”

“I don’t think the knife was her way to invite you in her life. I get why you… no, actually I don’t even get why you are so into this.”

Renji ignored the part he wasn’t able to put to words. “Maybe she thinks like you do and doesn’t want to involve me.”

“Maybe you should respect that?”

The sensible thing to do was obviously winning, in Ichigo’s mind if not his. Renji didn’t want to show the earphones, but had suspected some extra persuasion might be needed, and he had come prepared. He opened his backpack and drew the earphones out.

“The dead man had these. I don’t know why I took them, but I think there is something similar but not the same than when we feel. I’m involved already.”

Ichigo, who had finally turned his eyes from the sea, was staring Renji as if he had just produced a poisonous snake. 

“If you had had any sense in you, you’d throw those in the sea this second,” he said, sounding significantly older and more experienced than any high schooler should have. “You are playing with fire. Someone’s gonna get burned. I hope it isn’t you, but I think it will be.”

“I hear you. Will you help me or not? I can’t let it be, I just can’t. I have to find her.”

“Fine.” Ichigo turned his eyes back to the seagulls. “But I know nothing more than I’ve already said, and I don’t even know how much of that is real.”

Renji nodded, but waited for him to continue. He did.

“We were walking home, my mom and me, when she got robbed. And killed. She had a watch, plain and old, nothing special about it to the casual eye. The robbers didn’t take anything except it, no cash or cards or handbag or jewelry. I don’t like to talk about it, so this is me warning you one more time. Seriously, Renji, just be careful.”

Renji was scratching the number on the headband in somewhat absent-minded manner, when a new thought hit him. 

Had Rukia wanted him to take the earphones?

He didn’t speculate aloud. Instead, he continued with the watch. “I’m sorry to ask, but do you know where it was from? How your mom got it?”

“From my grandma. She got Alzheimer's when I was a kid, and ended in a nursing home. She died soon after. My mom had it less than a year. You know, you can still toss those,” Ichigo said, referring to the earphones.

Renji shook his head. “How can you not want to know? Aren’t you curious at all?”

“Of course I want to know! It’s not that, it’s really difficult to explain… I just don’t want to get killed or fall through the cracks or something. I’ve been trying to live a normal life. Do well in school, get a good job, so forth. My dad is a physician, maybe I’ll become one too, or a psychiatrist. It would be nice to help people to heal.”


	7. Chapter 7

On Friday, Renji tried to return to his normal life. Before it was even morning, he failed by waking far too early.

Laying on his bed he tried to decide whether he’d try to go back to sleep or get up. He didn’t feel tired at all, but it was 4 am – a time slightly closer to his average time of going to bed than waking up.

The apartment was hot and humid, the bed uncomfortably damp with sweat. 

He had to get up.

What did people do at the hour, Renji wondered a bit later, if they weren’t pulling an all-nighter or staggering home from parties? Even the internet seemed to be asleep.

Behind the window screen, the sky was starting to get pale. Mist swirled between the buildings. It would take a while before the sun would melt the wet veil away. 

The morning brought up a memory from years ago.

They were still living in the childrens’ home. Renji was fourteen, maybe fifteen. Without any care of the rainy and cold weather, himself, Izuru and Shuhei had slipped into a nearby town to celebrate the end of the school year. Later that evening, when they had managed to get themselves stupidly drunk, the trio had ‘borrowed’ two bikes to hasten the trip home.

Then, when Renji sat on the rack of a flat-tired women’s bike and hugged Izuru to keep from falling off, nature around him was slowly waking up and greeting the new day. Hidden within the light green leaves of the early summer, the birds were chirping and insects buzzing. The night’s rain had ceased, moisture in the air creating mists instead, and droplets of water hung on the tall grasses. Renji had suddenly felt strangely good, as if it whatever the life would hand him, everything would turn to be all right.

Back then, peace had been of rare supply.

Renji smiled at the memory. It was one of his favorite ones. He had plenty memories he considered good, but this one was especially sweet. It was free of the wordless, formless sense of threat that tarnished the sunny days of warm childhood summers, making them feel like the first few minutes of zombie movies. Those moments, when the deadly virus about to change the world into a post-apocalyptic hell was set loose, but nobody knew it just yet.

Losing himself into the mists would be fun. It was early enough for the temperature to be reasonably good for running, which was something Renji hadn’t done in quite a few weeks. The summer past hadn’t been one to encourage outdoor activities.

Renji changed into his running gear and picked up the old mp3 player instead of his phone. He wanted to take the new earphones, but didn’t dare to wear them in public just yet. He chose the old ones, but soon found he didn’t want to listen to music at all.

The mist was different than in Renji’s memories. It had been cool and refreshing, but this one had a tropical feel to it. This was salty moisture, forced out of the sea, and impatient to take back its suffocating watery form.

Renji half-jogged, half-ran to the beach. The air was motionless, even on the water. The sea was almost calm, a dark grey pool of molten lead. The color seemed to latch itself onto the fog, and the calls of seabirds seemed to come from some place far away.

Running didn’t go precisely well, which wasn’t a surprise. Renji only made it a short way before turning back to his apartment, and even then his lungs were burning. Served him right for smoking, he thought when he walked the last couple hundred meters to his house, and toyed with the possibility of quitting the smokes yet again.

Close to his house, he saw the first living thing on that day. It was a man, who sat on a bench close to his house and wore a pale gray suit with a darker tie. The tie made made Renji think of the sea.

“Good morning,” the man said without even looking at him.

Renji stopped in surprise. The man seemed to be focusing on the Rubik’s cube on his hands. 

“Morning,” he answered nevertheless.

The man turned his eyes to Renji. Even his eyes were gray. The pale morning light made his face appear paper white.

“I’ll call you back soon,” the man said. Renji noticed a hands-free, and felt like an idiot. His hand rose to scratch his head as if by its own volition.

“Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were speaking to me.”

“An understandable misunderstanding.”

“Uh, nice to meet you anyway. Are you new in here? I don’t remember seeing you around.”

“You are correct. I am new here.”

Renji offered his hand and introduced himself. The man didn’t smile, or take the hand.

“I am investigating,” the man said after a while.

“Like, doing research?” The phrasing was odd, but the man’s speech was unusually formal and his accent was strangely indistinct, like that of news reporter’s.  
“No. I mean that I am investigating the murder that took place in here approximately a week ago.”

“Uh,” Renji said again, and let out a laugh. He hoped he didn’t sound as nervous as he felt. “Sorry. Do you want to interrogate me?”

“Well, you happen to be in here. Do you know who Rangiku Matsumoto is?”

“Of course I do. Everyone knows who she is.”

“Do you know of her, or do you know her?”

“I mean, don’t know her that well…”

“What do you think of her?”  
Breathing was becoming increasingly difficult. The mild burning in his lungs was getting worse, not better. It had already become too uncomfortable to ignore.

“She is… Normal. Fun. Sharp, like, attentive.”  
“Is that all?”

The burning was getting to the point it made breathing difficult. Renji felt like someone was sitting on his chest, and that the someone was heavy.

“That’s… mostly it.”

“How about we go beyond the ‘mostly’?”

“I don’t understand...”

“Has she, for example, expressed behavior unusual for her?”

“No, she’s grieving, wouldn’t it be surprising if she wasn't… I have to sit down, I can’t breathe.”  
Renji half-sat, half-slumped on the ground and rested his head between his knees. It didn’t do much, but at least the man kept quiet.

Until he didn’t.

“Do you mind me asking if you are asthmatic,” he asked, his tone almost bored, “or if you have some other condition? Should I call an ambulance?”

Renji shook his head. His breathing came in short shallow gasps, but it wasn’t getting worse any longer.

“Was that to say that you do mind me asking, or that you do not need an ambulance?”

“I’ll... be fine.”

He didn’t feel like he’d be fine, but the man was creeping him out.

They waited in silence. Breathing was slowly getting easier.

“I was running,” he explained some time later, when he felt he had enough oxygen to waste. “I usually don’t run at this hour. I’m fine.”

The man gave the smallest nod Renji was capable of recognizing as one. “I do trust your words on that. Do you live nearby?”

“In the houses behind you,” Renji said without wanting to tell too much, but not seeing a better way out. He stood up and found his legs shaky.

“Good. You should probably go home. I’ll have to finish the call you disturbed.”

Renji nodded without any desire to question the words or tone. He headed to his apartment as fast as he dared.

* * *

When he returned to school, Renji learned three things. One: he was too far behind in math. Two: he was too far behind on Material Mechanics, and three: the botched project work had gotten him kicked out of the course. That left only the Thermodynamics lab work course, but he had until Wednesday before the introductory lectures would took place.

Renji had little reason to hang around campus, and Rukia had undoubtedly moved onto the mainland. If Renji was to guess, she had used a water taxi, the more expensive but significantly faster method to cross the water than the ferry.

The difficulty he faced was that Gin had died nine days ago. That meant Rukia had probably been gone eight days, and whoever had been driving the water taxi probably didn’t remember her.

The situation wasn’t helped by the three water taxi companies operating on the island. The companies were small, mom-and-pop establishments with only one boat in each fleet during the winter months, and none during the tourist season. Then, the boats were probably used to for sightseeing cruises or some similar shit, Renji guessed, but had never been interested enough to find out.

Nevertheless, he planned to find out if Rukia had returned to the mainland, if possible. If she had, she had so many places to go, so many opportunities to get lost in the mass of people that made the towns and the cities.

When Renji told Momo and Izuru that he planned to drop the courses and travel to the mainland, neither of his friends was pleased. That didn’t come as a surprise. Last time Renji had done the same thing, Shuhei and Izuru had retrieved him from a drunk tank two weeks later.

But that had been several years ago, and those two weeks had been discussed to death. Besides, he wasn’t the only one of them who had seen inside of a drunk tank in a context other than drug education. Izuru’s and especially Shuhei’s personal statistics had much more interesting content on that aspect. He failed to see what the big deal was, with him leaving.

“I won’t be doing anything stupid,” he was trying to convince Momo, who had voiced her worries. 

He was failing the task. Momo wasn’t quite pouting, but her demeanor made it clear that she didn’t approve of the decision.

He ended up offering a polished version of the truth. “I’m going to meet someone. I’ll be back on Wednesday, if not earlier.”

“Some girl?” Izuru asked, sounding more teasing than worried. “I’ve been telling you that you should find yourself a nice girl and settle down.” 

That earned a small giggle from Momo, who was clearly happier with this version of the truth. “He’s right, you can’t hang out with Rangiku for the rest of your life!”

The words took Renji by surprise. How much information did the two girls exchange, or was it just an innocent joke? 

Either way, he was saved by Izuru, who misunderstood the lack of answer. “Is it that on-line chick? Cool, have fun! I hope you’ll get along face-to-face, too.”

Renji nodded, if somewhat stiffly, and took his backpack. The on-line girl hadn’t written anything to him since beginning of the summer, but Renji didn’t want to explain any of that, nor did he have time. He had little more than two hours to pack his stuff, walk to the docks, ask the questions and buy the ticket.

“Good luck with her,” Momo said and, again to his surprise, hugged him. That surprise was nothing in comparison with the one he felt when he realized he was thinking her thoughts. 

It lasted a split-second, no more. He didn’t even have time to properly get a hold on what was going on in her head, except a strange mixture of anxiety and happiness, but that split-second was long enough to leave a pleasant sensation in his stomach.

He’d have chalked it under an occasional hiccup in his brain chemistry, but he saw Momo’s and Izuru’s faces. They looked exactly like when they _felt_.

Momo gave him a smile, and Renji could only admire her ability to recover. 

“Have fun, but please, please remember to take care of yourself,” she said. 

He promised. The friends exchanged quick see-you-soons, and Renji hurried on his way, too busy and fixated with the immediate practicalities to think about what had just happened.

* * *

Renji was in for another pleasant surprise. It turned out that only one water taxi company was operating from the School Island at the moment. One of the three wasn’t back from the summer break just yet, and the other had quit the business completely. There was a note on a dock billboard, thanking the customers for all the years.

Despite the good news, Renji felt slightly nervous about his timetable. The ferry was already moored at the pier, and students ready to travel home were loitering in front of the terminal. He had to hurry.

Renji headed to the office of the active company. The office located in one of ten or so wooden houses built next to the tiny dock area. All the houses were painted with the same deep blue color. Apple, cherry or plum trees or a combination of those were standing on the front lawns, which were visible from the docks side.

Finding the correct house was of no trouble. Renji rang the garage doorbell, and the door was soon opened by a man well-known on the island, due to the water taxi business. He was more than sixty years old, a retired fisherman with a thick gray beard. He looked like older version of Captain Haddock in Tintin, minus the pipe.

“Good afternoon,” Renji greeted him with his best polite tone. “I’m trying to find someone and I think she maybe used the water taxi to travel to the main land. I was hoping you might be able to help.”

Captain Haddock (his real name was Iinuma) nodded and waited for more.

“I think she crossed on Thursday or after that. She’s real short,” Renji made a gesture to show Rukia’s approximate height, “and her hair is black and short.”

The captain smiled. “Dear son, that’s almost a quarter of my customers. You’ll have to have something better.”

Renji closed his eyes and tried to remember the adult Rukia in as much detail as possible. Their encounter had been short, and the locker room dark. “Thin, pale. Beautiful big purple eyes.”

Iinuma shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell. I’d remember purple eyes… If I noticed them, that is. My own eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

“What about the rest?”

“There were three young ladies of that description today only, of yesterday I don’t can’t even remember. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you with this one.”

“Oh. Thank you for trying, though,” Renji said, disappointed. He had thought Rukia’s description was somewhat rare. Perhaps the high school screwed the statistics up?

“You’re welcome. Good luck with your girl. If I was to guess, I’d say she left on Thursday. That was a busy day, everyone wanted to go home early because of the dead guy.”

Renji thanked him again and turned to leave.

* * *

There was a queue in the terminal, but Renji got his ferry ticket early enough to buy some reading material from a small kiosk. The trip to the main land took two hours, give or take. The distance wasn’t that long, but the ferry made a stop at the Fish Island, which was approximately of the same size than the School Island, but less populated. 

Renji didn’t think for a minute that Rukia would have gone to the Fish Island. On it everybody knew everyone and their business. The people got their livelihoods by fishing, and, Renji had suspected for a long time, kept living on the island mostly out of spite. He had never seen such shitty houses as on the Fish Island, not ones someone was still living in.

He bought a candy bar and the newest volume of Popular Science, and sat on the ferry terminal stairs to wait the boarding. He lit a cigarette, knowing that smoking on board was not allowed, and kept watching the mass of students waiting with him. The docks were getting crowded. Fridays and Sundays tended to be the busiest days.

When the cigarette was almost finished, Renji spotted someone with familiar orange hair.

“Ichigo, hey!” he yelled and waved. The kid seemed to be traveling alone.

Ichigo didn’t spot him immediately, and Renji kept waving after he did. Finally, they managed to make eye contact.

“Where are you going?” Renji asked, when Ichigo was close enough that he didn’t have to yell.

“Home.” He dropped his backpack on the stairs. “I visit the old man and my sisters once or twice in a month. What about you?”

“I’m going to find a girl,” Renji said, grinning. He inhaled the last of the smoke and put the cigarette out. “No offense, but our talk didn’t give me too much concrete stuff to work with. I figured someone might remember her on the mainland.”

“None taken, but are you sure you should go? I’m still thinking you’ll find a fuck-ton of trouble instead. I kind of, uh, thought you already had.”

“How so?” Renji did his best to read Ichigo’s face. To be honest, it wasn’t unreadable. Renji just didn’t know what to make of it.

“I kind of felt like it,” he phrased the answer, after taking a while.

Renji just nodded. A silence fell over them, but it was a silence full of unvoiced words and thoughts so restless Renji could almost hear them. Or maybe it was just the chitchat around them, the restless students anxious to get going.

Finally, Ichigo sighed. “You shouldn't be going alone, it might be dangerous. I’ll came with you.” 

“What about your family?”

“I’ll call them and say I’ve got some bug or heat exhaustion or something. I’ll see them the next weekend instead.”

Renji felt like pointing out that coming was in poor agreement with what he had said before about trying to live a normal life. But he did want someone with him, a person who’d take the whole thing seriously. So he kept his silence on that.

Instead he nodded. “Thanks. I’ll cover your trip, so that your dad won’t wonder why his germ-ridden son is wasting money with tickets and stuff.” 

* * *

The ferry jerked slightly when it touched the pier. The trip itself had been typical: uneventful and rather boring. 

The day wasn’t windy, and the sea was calm. The rhythm of the engines had lulled Ichigo to sleep, and Renji had browsed the magazine without focusing the words. He had been thinking how he had thought Momo’s thoughts, and if he could do the same at will.

If he could, could he do it without Ichigo finding out?

On the other hand, if Ichigo felt it, it was his problem. And if Renji was far enough, maybe Ichigo wouldn’t even notice, or if he would, maybe he wouldn’t realize who was doing it.

If he did notice… why would Renji even care? He didn’t answer to Ichigo, or any other high schooler.

The gates opened, and the passengers started to stand up and gather their things. Ichigo was still asleep, and Renji poked his side.

“Wake up, everyone is moving already.”

Ichigo opened his eyes, stretched and yawned. “What do you plan on doing?”

“Let’s get a room, I know a hostel in here. We can leave our stuff in there. Then we’ll just have to search. Maybe we ought to split up and ask around in different places, we’d cover more ground that way.”

Renji and Ichigo joined to the slow flow towards dry land. The students around them were in good spirits, laughing and joking loudly. The old fishermen were smiling and chuckling, happyfor the opportunity to spend a weekend in the town, free of their wives. 

The old and the young left the ferry, walking one after the other down the thick plywood bridge. After it, the crowd dissolved quickly.

Unlike on the School Island, the town had a real port. Ichigo and Renji had arrived on its passenger side. The street lamps had ornate poles, and the benches were made of carefully painted wood. The old buildings had been converted into restaurants, or shops selling handcrafts or souvenirs. 

There were even a couple of maritime museums. The streets were decorated with potted plants, and if you chose to walk toward the town center, you ended up at the Seamen’s Church build by the local Catholic fishermen. The stone church had endured a lot of history, including the world war, and was an attraction to the tourists in the town.

The fishers, Catholics and otherwise, had left their mark at the town. It still mostly lived on the sea and fish industry. North of the passenger side of the port was the cargo area and fishing dock. There, the buildings were newer, the piers larger. The cargo ships traveled from afar, and fishing vessels of different sizes lured in seagulls in swarms.

Renji had oftentimes thought that the tourists who wished to see the traditional way of life were looking in the wrong direction. The tradition wasn’t in the impractically shaped lampposts or flowerpots. It was in the ordinary life: in the smell of fish, cries of seagulls, the fraying plastic ropes the fishers bound their vessels with, using the same knots as their fathers and grandfathers had used before them.

This time, Renji and Ichigo didn’t go to the cargo area or fishing port. They walked past the Seamen’s Church, to the hostel Renji knew. The town’s railway and bus station were in the same direction as well – and both were places Renji thought promising when it came to tracking Rukia down.

“How well do you know the town?” Renji asked Ichigo, who was walking next to him and frowning slightly. The high schoolers weren’t allowed to go to the town to have fun, but Ichigo was living alone. In practice the rules were different if you lived alone.

Ichigo shrugged. “So-so. I can find the railway station, some of the malls and likes.”

“That’s good. You take the malls, I’ll deal with bars and restaurants?”

This division of work was ok with Ichigo, or as well as any would. He looked deeply unhappy with what was going on. Torn-- as if he wanted to be there, but would be happier to be anywhere else.

The two of them found the hostel with ease. It was a run-down place, even for a hostel, but the price was reasonable. Anyway, Renji was more interested in the price than the number of stars the place rated. As long as he could leave his stuff unguarded and have a place to sleep and wash up, he was good. He was prepared to search Rukia for more than a day.

The town wasn’t large, but going through the necessary hotels, shops and main traveling hubs would take time. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that each would be staffed multiple people on different shifts, so Renji and Ichigo would have to ask many times in each place. 

Renji had seriously considered handing out fliers, but quickly abandoned the idea. He was worried that someone else might be trying to find Rukia and/or the earphones.

He’d have to get something to protect himself with, just in case.

When Renji and Ichigo agreed on practical aspects, such as what they’d do in case either of them found a person fitting Rukia’s description, Renji’s thoughts were wandering towards the earphones, and if he could think other people’s thoughts because of them.

Maybe Ichigo could even help him to find out.

“Hey, before you go,” he said, “there’s something I want to try.”

“Yeah?”

Renji took the earphones out of the backpack and placed them around his neck. Ichigo was looking at him with a face that suggested disgust, but he remained silent.

“Give me your hand,” Renji said, when nothing was happening.   
After a brief moment of hesitation, Ichigo offered his hand in silence. Renji took it.

When their hands touched, Ichigo’s thoughts darted around Renji’s brain. They were mixed thoughts, distrust towards the experiment, blended with curiosity, and absolute horror, when he could _feel_. Right next to those thoughts was the knowledge of how an occluded front formed where cold and warm fronts met, and how lenticular clouds resembled flying saucers.   
Ichigo drew his hand away almost immediately, but now Renji knew how to do it. He was sure he didn’t need the physical contact anymore.

Ichigo no longer looked just plain unhappy, though. He was pale, and the corner of his mouth twitched as if it didn’t know if Ichigo was about to scream, yell or puke.

He chose yelling.

“Don’t you fucking dare to do that again! Jesus fucking Christ in Hell, it’s like someone tied my fucking guts into a bow!”

Renji tilted his head in surprise. It was funny, really. Thinking the boy’s thoughts had been pleasant, not horrible in any way. 

Still, he promised not to do it ever again to Ichigo. There were other people, plenty of those who probably wouldn’t even have a clue about what was happening.

* * *

It was a long two days of walking and asking questions.

On Sunday, Ichigo had to return to the School Island. He explained they needed either a permission slip from their parents, or a written note from a doctor or a nurse to be excused from school. Skipping was out of the question.

Ichigo took the ferry to the School Island. 

Renji bought a ticket to where he suspected Rukia had gone: a larger town, the nearest one with an airport.

The two days were not only long, but also tiring. Renji had learned that there were plenty of short, dark-haired women even in a small-ish town, and few people paid attention to the color of their eyes. 

He had also learned that the people’s thoughts were incredibly messy. No one was ever thinking only one thing at the time, and only a fraction of the thinking was done in words.

If the guys who made movies had any idea about how it worked, they’d be ashamed of all the crap they had made along the years, Renji thought when he gave his ticket to the driver. 

Or maybe they just didn’t care. 

The driver was thinking of his kids, the route he was about to drive and his penis, but mostly the song that was stuck in his head.

In the movies, the one capable of reading others’ thought always heard fully-formed, grammatically correct sentences. In reality, almost no one planned like that, even what they wanted to say next. The thoughts were made of information from the senses, the emotions, unconscious planning of the next action and, of course, memories and associations that popped up in seemingly random manner.

Funny how he had never seen it in his own thoughts.

The bus jerked into motion, and Renji sat in the closest empty seat he could find. It was next to a redhead he found attractive. If, from what Renji pulled from her thoughts, she had any interest in dating men, and if Renji himself wasn’t on a mission, he might have tried flirting.

As it was, he nodded a brief greeting. 

The new skill of his was proving more useful at every passing second.

One of the most useful things in it, he had found out, was how a careful choice of words could make thoughts or memories surface. That was how he finally found out where Rukia had gone. One of cashiers in the bus station had vague memories of someone who looked like Rukia, and the other remembered seeing purple eyes.

The patchwork information wasn’t what Renji had hoped for, but the choice seemed logical. Airports were where you disappeared for good. There was the faceless crowd of strangers, and within a few hours you could be anywhere in the world. That’s why they never found out who his mother was.

The bus drove through suburbs, and occasionally stopped to take more passengers in. The doors made a quiet hydraulic hiss when they slid open, and Renji tried to hone his skill by reading the newcomers. 

At one stop, the first one to come in was a mother. She was mostly hoping her boy would behave well during the trip. Behind her and the child was a young man about to visit his girlfriend. He had planned a romantic surprise and looked towards it with a great anticipation. Renji smiled and mentally wished him good luck with his girl.

He was just about to check up the fourth new guy when the bus blurred in his sight. There was a weight on his chest, and a coldness in his guts.

 _It’s like drinking liquid nitrogen_ , he thought, in words and with extreme but detached clarity. The part that was less detached was thinking through the technicalities of such an action, and cooking up a mental image of blood on snow. The part that was really him was mainly focused on panicking.

Renji hugged his backpack and tried to find the knife he had bought, just in case, but his hands were clumsy and fingers numb, and he couldn’t see anything. The darkness was eating away even the blood on snow, and just before it swallowed him as well, he felt himself falling from the seat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dun dun dun enter the part where the strange stuff begin!
> 
> I don't remember if I've mentioned that I'm doing an English re-write of this story. The first version was written a long time ago, maybe 10 years or so. Then I didn't work with the story for a long while. It was a beautiful day, early-ish spring, when I picked the story up again. There was still snow, but not that much. I wrote by hand, which I didn't often do back then, and wrote the part in which Renji and Ichico are in the town. It was super nice and I ended up writing rest of the story by hand. Later on, when I had put everything on computer for editing and so forth, I burned the papers one by one. It was super fun to read random parts before throwing the pages into flames.


	8. Chapter 8

The only time Renji had been hospitalized since infancy was when he was fourteen. He had been roll-skating, taken a fall and broken his wrist. The pieces had dislocated badly enough to require surgery, and he had been put under general anesthesia.

Waking up was like it had been back then. There was a fleeting perception of existence, which was joined by an understanding that the mind existed within a body. But the body felt alien and heavy, unmovable, rubbery. He could feel someone touching his face, but it didn’t really feel like his face.

The indistinct noises were starting to form sounds he could recognize. The muted hum was a running bus engine. The higher pitch formed syllables, words and sentences. His sight, which had shrunk into small bright points, widened. 

The alien body was starting to feel like his own. Renji was not thrilled to find out it (he) was lying on the bus floor. The hands on his face were those of the woman who had just hopped in the bus with a child. The brat was sitting on a seat nearby and making funny faces at Renji.

He tried to sit up, but the nurse stopped him. The woman was a nurse, Renji knew with a certainty that surprised even him. She had another child at home, and a husband.

“Take it easy,” the nurse said. “You passed out. Do you have any conditions that might explain it? Diabetes, heart issues?”

Renji stared the woman for a second. She was a tall and slender blond, but not like Rangiku. More like Gin had been. Like Gin’s, her hair was almost white and chopped short.

“No,” Renji answered, when he could think properly. “No, it’s this heat. I skipped lunch. I feel fine now.”

Fine was a bit of an exaggeration, and the bus was air conditioned, but he didn’t try to fix the lie. Instead he sat up slowly, just to be sure.

“Is it ok if I continue driving?” the driver asked, peering back. There was an unhappy edge in his voice. “We have a timetable to keep.”

Both Renji and the nurse ok’d it at the same time. The nurse searched her handbag and took out a tiny jar of baby food, a chocolate bar and a bottle of water. She handed them to Renji, who didn’t know what else to do other than place them on his currently unoccupied seat.

“Eat those,” the nurse said. “I’ll buy a new one for Joben, no need to worry about that. Remember to drink, and make sure you get enough salts. The baby food is peach puree, in case you are wondering. Just a second, I’ll give you a spoon, too. See your doctor if this happens again, ok?”

Renji thanked her.

While the nurse kept searching her handbag, Renji collected his belongings. He wasn’t happy to pick his dirty underwear from the floor with everyone staring at him, but to his relief, the knife hadn’t fallen out. Only the handle wrapped in paper towels was visible, and no one apparently had paid any attention to it.

The nurse handed him a plastic spoon. Renji thanked her again, and sat on his seat.

He felt nervous and stupid, chewing chocolate and spooning the baby food into his mouth, but at least the show was over. The other passengers had returned to whatever they had been doing, and the bus was moving again.

Renji had experienced quite a few long bus trips. Some of them had been long in the objective, measurable-with-clocks type of way. Sometimes the length had been of a more subjective type. Once, during his late teenage years, he had traveled almost 800 kilometers while horribly hungover. A mother with a fussy baby and a seat-kicking child had sat in the seats behind him, and there had been an elderly lady carrying cheese and smoked fish.

On the subjective scale, the bus trip Renji was facing was as long, if not longer than that one. He didn’t pass out again, and no one was kicking his seat, but he was worried and afraid. Part of the fear was for him, part for Rukia. Renji was surely not the only one searching for her.  
It was also dawning to Renji that if and when he could think other people’s thoughts, maybe the others could do the same to him. What if it was an exchange – Renji got the thoughts of his ‘victim’, and they thought his thoughts for a while?

The worst part wasn’t privacy. It was security. Renji couldn’t stop thinking about Rukia and the earphones, the two topics he didn’t want to share with strangers.

Around the halfway point, an even more disturbing thought made itself known. What if the others could affect his thoughts, or even his actions? Something or someone had made him pass out, and it wasn’t a missed lunch.

It just kept getting worse. That someone was in the bus with him, in this box with wheels, getting closer and closer to Rukia.

Or maybe they had gotten out already. Renji hadn’t paid attention to those leaving the bus. He didn’t remember their faces.

Either way, he wasn’t thinking others’ thoughts any more. He wanted to, but didn’t dare. Instead, he spent rest of the time staring out of the window and forcing himself to think through various formulas and definitions of thermodynamic systems.

He dared to stop only after the bus reached the last stop, a square next to an airport, and even then he waited until everyone else, except the driver, had left the bus.

According to his original plan, Renji was to start searching for Rukia immediately, but the plan didn’t seem a good one anymore. If someone was keeping an eye on him, he’d be helping whoever else was trying to find her. That didn’t do. He’d have to find a way to defend his thoughts, and he needed time to find one.

Renji didn’t know the town he had arrived into. He disliked flying, which had contributed greatly to his stock of Funny Stories Of Long Bus Drives, but also made it so that he had never arrived on the School Island through the town. 

Luckily for him, the bus station was a couple hundred meters from the airport, and about two kilometers from the airport hotel. 

It didn’t take James Cook’s cartographic skills to locate the place, but Renji’s shirt was soaked with sweat before he managed to reach the hotel. The heat on the School Island or the coastal area was nothing in comparison with the oven-like heat in the inlands. 

Renji found himself missing seagulls and the salty air. In here, between the high concrete walls, the air moved only because air conditioning units pushed hot air out. Tiny mirages formed on the asphalt and the streets smelled of hot pitch and exhaust gases.

Before he reached the hotel, Renji found a small shop. He bought more cigarettes and something to pass as food: bread, fruits, chips and a couple bottles of Fanta.

No one entered the shop after him, but he couldn’t stop feeling like someone was watching him.

The airport hotel was larger and fancier that Renji had expected. It was also more expensive, but he showed his credit card. The bill was going to ruin him, he’d be begging money from Izuru or Shuhei as it was.

Wednesday’s lecture would be a goner, too. He wouldn’t be able to cough up the money for the water taxi, and he wasn’t prepared to leave the town early enough to use the ferry on Tuesday.

On the positive side, the room was comfortable. It wasn’t especially big, but it was clean, in good condition and, most importantly, air-conditioned.

Right after closing the door after him, Renji threw his backpack on the floor and went to shower with his clothes on. Sweat, dust and whatever dirt he had collected from the bus floor run into the drain in a grayish stream. 

The water turned clear after a while. Renji took off his clothes and threw then into the sink. He didn’t have any washing powder with him, but he’d use hand soap on the clothes later in the evening.

He checked the wound, and was happy to see that despite his dive, it hadn’t suffered. It was still healing well, the stitches now removed. It went over some of his tattoos and would leave a scar, but Renji figured that if he walked away from this mess with only one scar, he’d consider himself lucky.

After the shower and a quick smoke on the balcony he was starting to feel somewhat ok. It was easier to think in the pleasantly cool hotel room, but that alone didn’t make it easy to find the solutions. How was he supposed to ensure his thoughts belonged to him and to him only, when he didn’t even know how others could access them? Maybe they had some other item, similar to his headphones?

He could, of course, steer away from those who had them, but how would he know who did? Momo, Izuru, Shuhei and Ichigo hadn’t noticed anything before Renji had put his new abilities into use. 

Perhaps they hadn’t wanted to notice – Renji himself hadn’t, not until now. Maybe he’d have to learn how to open himself for feeling instead of trying to block it out.

Renji spent rest of the day trying to learn how to spot the hints. It was difficult work, took a lot concentration and wasn’t helped by lack of any kind of feedback.

He did his best anyway. When it was time to go to sleep, he searched the room for cutlery and put them between the frames of the doors and windows. If someone entered the room, the knives, spoons and forks would fall, and the noise would wake him up.

* * *

Renji woke early every day and ate the breakfast included in the hotel room price. He judged the food good, although the businessmen complained. 

After breakfast, he walked around the town and kept asking if someone had seen Rukia. The results were rather depressing. The town was much larger than the previous one, and more used to a constant stream of strangers traveling through. No one looked at anyone twice.  
It was so easy to disappear into the town.

Tuesday began as any the days before it. The town was still hot, but Renji had gotten used to the heat, to a degree. The pitch lines crossing the streets still copied the patterns in his shoe soles, but walking around felt marginally less tiring than before.

Renji started his rounds at the airport. It was relatively small, only one runway, and there were zero hints of the frenzied tax-free shopping seen at the international airports. No jewelry, no perfumes or fancy chocolate. In addition to a check-in and such, there was just a small kiosk, a cafeteria and a gift shop.   
The faces behind the desks he could access without buying a ticket were familiar for Renji. He asked everyone anyway.

“Didn’t see her today either,” the guard said before Renji even had time to ask. The day he had arrived he had chatted with the guard for some time. The man apparently had time to kill, or maybe he wanted to keep him with an eye.

“You ask like some kind of a secret agent,” the guard continued, clearly amused. “If she’s your friend, why don’t you just find her in a phone book and give her a call?”

Renji nodded. The thought had occurred to him. “I tried that, and those services that give you the number by name. Couldn’t find her there.”

“I reckon she might not want to see you, then.”

“Nah, more likely she has some crazy ex or the like, and doesn’t even know I’m trying to find her,” Renji said, suddenly wanting to change the subject. “What does an old guard like you know about secret agents?”

“Well, I’ve done this longer that you’ve been alive.”

“Guarding airports, you mean?”

“Close, but not quite. I was a border guard. Sometimes I worked in the customs, but there was other kinds of work, too.”

The idle chatter was turning interesting. It wasn’t such a long time since the cold war had ended. Maybe the old man had seen something for real.

And what had been the role of the unseen forces?

“Did you ever see spies or terrorists or such for real?” Renji asked, trying to manage a tone of idle curiosity.  
The guard’s thoughts were a collection of hundreds and hundreds of body searches producing nothing, but also women who had swallowed pieces of film. Men who tried to move papers from one county to another by stuffing them inside the backseats of their cars.

“A couple times. Mostly from the Soviet countries, for reasons that were obvious back then.”  
“Did you ever see anything, like, super strange?”

“Once or twice. It was a different world back then… They were smugglers from the Soviet countries. Or prolly defectors, it wasn’t like it was always easy to tell the difference. I’ve been thinking I might write a book about it someday, now that the times have changed.”

When the man spoke, an image of a naked Slavic beauty flashed in his mind. The woman’s back was tattooed with a long writing about an angel of death, and she vomited vodka and diamonds on his shoes when the he opened the trunk of a matte brown Lada.

Renji smiled. Maybe, after he found Rukia, he’d come back to chat with the guard. He was bound to have some amazing stories.

As it was, however, nothing suggested that the man knew anything he needed. Renji continued his walk to a bus stop, and took a bus to the town center. He asked in hotels, and in diners and fast food joints.

He met a lot of people, many of whom were busy and rude, and no one remembered seeing a girl with purple eyes.

When lunch time was at hand, Renji chose an affordable diner and bought the cheapest item on the menu. It was soup. He knew he’d stay hungry, but his monthly budget was already screaming in agony.

The food didn’t even taste good. Too much salt, not enough solids.

On the more positive side, the place was quiet. It wasn’t a surprise, considering the food quality, but he felt like he needed a moment in relative peace. The background noise was a radio, and the hit music almost disappeared under the hum of a fan. The building didn’t have air conditioning, and smells of the different dishes and cooking oil mixed.

Renji ate the soup slowly, and lazily watched the wall opposite of him. Someone had painted goldfishes of different colors on it. Some were black, some white, some mottled, and some had the gold-tinted tone typically associated with the species. The bright colors and surprisingly skillfully added accents made the fish look almost like they were moving.

At the table next to Renji sat two men and a woman. He could hear what they were speaking of. Usually he didn’t eavesdrop on strangers, as he didn’t care what they thought of their mothers-in-law, the teachers of their children, or the prime minister. This time the topic was actually interesting, so he made an exception.

The group at the next table were speaking of a new bio-fuel plant which was being built on the coast. Renji had read of it and had a personal interest towards it, as the plant was located only a couple of hundred kilometers from the School Island. The plant was supposed to start producing around the time Renji, Momo and Izuru would be graduating, which made it an interesting potential place to find work.

“Did you have time to look the biorefining part?” the woman asked between mouthfuls. She and her company were dressed formally, but the discussion was clearly informal.

“Not too much, we’ll go there in the next meeting. It was more about the power plant.”

There was a small break in the conversation. Renji didn’t stare, but he guessed the woman took some time to chew and swallow before she continued speaking. “How about the raw material? Where is it supposed to come from? Or is it confidential?”

“We didn’t go there, I think it might be. I’m kind of worried about that, though. I mean, the whole thing’s going to shit and piss itself if some idiot makes a contract for some crap our--,” there was a break, presumably the man finding a word not too telling for anyone possibly eavesdropping, “goo can’t eat.”

The woman nodded. “That’s why I’m asking. I can totally see some consultant comparing prices and going for the marginally cheaper stuff because hey, the name’s same, can’t be any different. Those guys live in a totally different world than we do, La-la-land or something.”

The men laughed, the woman seemed to half-shrug. “But if that happens, it’s not our fault anyway, and we’ll know where the blame is. Do you want dessert?”

“From here?”

“We could buy donuts or something on the way back.”

After that, the discussion moved to donut fillings and coffee, which no longer maintained Renji’s interest. 

He ate rest of the soup and asked the cashier if he’d seen Rukia. The cashier hadn’t, and Renji continued his walking and asking.

A couple hours later, the day’s hottest hour was getting close. The thermometer at the town hall wall showed almost 35 C. It was located in shadow.

The air between the buildings was stagnant and stale. The wound in Renji’s chest itched, but he didn’t want to scratch it, or even slap it like he’d slap a healing tattoo. To do so would hurt, and look stupid in middle of the street. He was thirsty and the streets were starting to feel too crowded.

He spotted a movie theater. It advertised air conditioned halls, romantic comedy and space action.  
Without thinking it much further, Renji entered the theater. The daytime show of the space action movie was about to start. There were few customers in the lobby, which wasn’t surprising. The movie wasn’t a big deal, and pretty much everyone was at school or work.

“Mars: The Different World, and popcorn. Make it XL,” he heard a teenage boy order, and was startled by the familiar words. 

He gave a closer look to the movie poster. Apparently the movie was reheating the old plot of aliens attacking humankind, usually for a reason that didn’t stand against any logical or scientific inspection. The poster was practically shouting promises of two hours spent with tacky special effects and amazement on what kind of crap passed as sci-fi these days.

“What would you like?” the cashier asked. He radiated boredom, but made Renji force his mind back to the present.

“Zero-five of Fanta and a small bag of chips. Sour cream & onion.”

“Which movie?”

“Neither, thanks.”

He got the drink and chips, paid them and took a seat in the lobby. It would be nice to eat in the theater, out of sun.

It didn’t took long until the theater opened and the people waiting began to walk inside. Soon, Renji was left alone with the cashier. He’d have to talk to him again. The damn movie name had confused him so much he had to forget to ask about Rukia.

Before he had another chance, a security guard entered the lobby and told him to move it.

Renji told the guard what he thought of brainless wannabe-police goons, and left the theater. He’d come back the next day.

He threw the empty bottle to the trash on the way out, but there were some chips left. He put them in his backpack.

As soon as he opened the movie theater door, he was greeted by the hot air. The traffic noise was worse than it had been, or maybe the quiet lobby had made his ears more sensitive. The strangers on the streets were walking too close to him.

He tried to smoke, but it did nothing to calm his nerves. He put the cigarette out.

The distance felt longer than it had in the previous day. His throat was so dry it was making breathing difficult. 

The streets were so much fuller than he had expected.

It hit him again. It wasn’t _feeling_ , not per se, but it came close. Whatever had happened in the bus was happening again.

Hot air stuck in his throat. Purple and shining black dots started to dance in front of his eyes. There weren’t any benches (of course there weren’t when he needed one), and soon he had to lean on a nearby wall for support. He could hear his blood pounding in his ears, but everything else was distant.

The dots took over his vision. He sat down, without even thinking if there was spit or some other urban filth on the street. 

The people passing by were looking, he knew but couldn’t see. Among them was the one doing this to him, and the only thing he could do was to hope the others didn’t look away, didn’t let that one physically hurt him. The air felt greasy and tasted like metal.

He couldn’t show weakness. He felt around for his backpack before finding it on his left side, and got on his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. 

“Are you ok?” The voice was not familiar. It was soft and kind, maybe a baritone, but carried a hidden threat.

“Of course.”

His voice was hollow and the words came out strangely slurred. He didn’t plan on staying and explaining himself. The faster he was gone, the better. He’d rather run blind than stay.

He started to walk, but after few steps something hit his hip. Before the pain even registered, the second hit got his face. 

He fell. 

The audience stared, he could feel it. His legs were rubbery and tingling strangely, and his backpack and the knife were lost again. There was no running, no fighting.

It was the end.

“We’d better call an ambulance.” 

The only thing to do was to give up. Renji did so, put his head on his knees and started crying. 

How was is possible to cry, when breathing felt next to impossible?  
Someone spoke, probably asked something. He could make out the words, but didn’t listen enough to make any sense of them.

He kept crying. 

Nothing bad happened. 

More time passed, and nothing bad happened.

The dots started to die out. The colors around him were off, but at least he could saw what was happening. A man in a dark blue suit was talking to a cellphone. Another man in a similar suit was standing next to him and holding a briefcase. The audience was gone, but a man crying next to a lamp post was still getting some curious looks.

He hadn’t been hit, he had walked himself to a fucking lamp post!

Sadly, that didn’t make him feel any better.

The cellphone man nodded at him. “The ambulance will be here real soon. The hospital is close by.”

Renji rested his head on his knees again. The sidewalk was covered with gray and muted maroon stones shaped like angular letter S’s. Gray, maroon, gray, maroon, gray, gray, gray. The three grays were an obvious anomaly.

A car parked close to the trio. Renji took a quick look at it. It was an ambulance.

The paramedics spoke briefly with the men in fancy suits. No, as far as they knew, it wasn’t intoxicants. But no, they didn’t quite know, they had just happened to be there and called for help. 

One of the paramedics crouched next to Renji and asked him the same things. He could only answer by shaking his head, and the paramedic asked if she could touch him. 

He nodded. Anything to get up from the street, under the curious eyes of strangers.

She took his pulse. She checked his eyes.

“We could take you to the hospital for a check-up. Would that be ok for you?”

Renji nodded again. Anything to get up from the street, out from under the curious eyes of strangers. 

The paramedics helped him up and in the ambulance. One of them kept chatting. Renji didn’t listen too well, it was just small talk. How nice it was to finally have the weather for swimming, and oh, quite soon it’d be winter and then Christmas time.

The other paramedic gave him a tissue, and he blew his nose. Soon after that, the ambulance arrived at the hospital.

Renji felt a lot better, but still too dizzy to want to stand up or leave the car. The paramedics didn’t offer the option of not leaving, but the chatty one got him a wheelchair and pushed him to a lobby.

After that the process moved quickly. The paramedics left. He showed his ID to the triage nurse and managed to answer her questions calmly, feeling empty and too tired to think properly. Not that much thinking was needed to answer questions like how old he was, who was the president or had he done drugs recently. There was one difficult question in their arsenal, though: did he know why, exactly, he had come to ER? 

“We’ll take an EKG,” the triage nurse said, “just to make sure it’s clear. The room isn’t occupied, so this won’t take long. Please wait, I’ll call them to take you there.”

Renji sat still for about five minutes. Then a nurse arrived, a tall woman whose hair was almost white and cropped short.

The woman who had helped him in the buss.

Was she the cause? No – she couldn’t be, she hadn’t been there on the street. Right? He couldn’t know for sure.

Fear came in waves, but this time it was somehow detached, like whatever was going on was happening to someone else. 

“Nice to meet you,” the nurse said, smiling. Her name tag read Isane, and there was no hint in her face or voice that they had ever met before. “My name is Isane. I’ll take you to the EKG room. Have you had one before?”

Still no hint of recognition.

It felt off. Renji wasn’t used to getting completely forgotten. Name, sure, occupation, who cared, but his hair and tattoos typically ensured a certain level of memorability for his face.   
Something was terribly wrong.  
But strangely enough, seeing Isane gave back some sense of control. No longer stuck between fight and flight, his mind was free.

He hadn’t had an EKG before. He said so. Isane explained the test and took him to a separate room.

Out from plain view. Where and when he was most vulnerable.

Before panic made it through the detached sensation, they were greeted by another nurse, or probably a med tech. His presence made things less unnerving, but even stranger, as he greeted Isane like a long-lost friend. 

Isane only nodded, and did even that very stiffly.

“I thought you left the ER for that ward job after Joben was born?” the tech said, clearly taken aback by the cold treatment.

Isane didn’t offer an answer. She turned to Renji instead.

“This,” she said and took a small clip from a cart full of medical equipment, “measures oxygen saturation. As you can see, there are no needles or anything strange. I’ll just put this on your finger.”

The engineer in Renji wondered briefly how a glorified clothespin was supposed to measure anything, but he was too tired and still too scared to care. He only nodded.

Isane gave him a smile, probably to encourage him, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “The clip will stay on during the test. My colleague will attach the electrodes and continue with the test. I’ll be in the back, but I can see and hear you all the time.”

Had her previous smile been as dead? Renji couldn’t remember. He had been too unfocused to notice. Hell, he had been too unfocused to remember the way in.

He’d risk it.

Thinking her thoughts drained him what little strength he had recovered.

They were a confused mess around the routine tasks related with the patient. The colleagues kept treating her like she had been away for years, and several seemed to think she had two kids. And, on top for that, whose bright idea had been changing all the forms and the software systems without telling her? The whole day had been a total shitshow, and didn’t seem to be getting any better.

 _Hang in there, hon_ , Renji thought, _it’s not going that fucking great in this side either_.

If Isane picked up the thoughts, she didn’t show it. Renji didn’t have the energy to care either way. He just wanted to be released and sleep for a week. He wasn’t having a heart attack, not even a panic attack, which was what Isane thought. But he was wasting time.

When the med tech asked, he took his shirt off. The electrodes felt cold on his skin at first, but not unpleasant. 

The test and the ones following it seemed to take forever.

Later on he took a cab to the hotel. Most likely a panic attack, the doctor had decided, oh yes, nasty things, those, but not dangerous. If it happened again, he should see a doctor about it, and get some blood work done to eliminate the rare possibilities. Consider quitting smoking and limiting caffeine intake, so forth. And, oh, of course: avoid stress.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I'm updating a day late. I kind of... forgot it was Tuesday?

Renji was confident that Rukia had left town days ago. 

The track was cold. He was out of funds. The ambulance ride bill undoubtedly waited in his apartment.

It was time to go home.

The bus trip to the coast was mundane enough. Renji spent most of it staring out of the window and harboring dark thoughts. He had failed, for now, but wasn’t about to stop trying. 

He just needed something better to go by, something more concrete.

The ferry was late.

Renji waited and watched closely the passengers-to-be. There weren’t many, and most had twenty years or more on him. Wednesdays were like that. Few students traveled to the School Island, or out of it.

Two men were chatting and, apparently, joking next to Renji. A father and a son, he guessed, based on the ages and how similar the two looked. Clearly fishermen, tanned despite the lousy summer. When the older one laughed, it was obvious he hadn’t seen a dentist in years, possibly in his entire life.

The black and yellow of his teeth was mesmerizing. Renji stared at him, the teeth, the smile and the wrinkled face. 

For a brief moment, he saw the layers of the world. They lived in separate layers, him and the old fisherman. Under the same sun, but the world was showing them a different face.

The moment of clarity passed, but didn’t go without leaving a mark.

He had been so fucking blind.

Whatever had happened to Rukia had taken her away, to a layer different from the one Renji lived in. She was in a different world now, a darker one.

He had to follow her. 

He’d find someone who shared that layer, that world of hers. He’d find someone who had an item. He didn’t know where, exactly, but there had to be at least one in the School Island. Renji had _felt_ often enough to be confident about it. And then there was the man with the Rubic’s cube. 

It was so obvious, so clear now. Granted, he didn’t know where to start this new search, but he did have an idea of who he’d try to find.

The ferry docked. Soon enough, the passengers walked down the same worn plywood Renji and Ichigo had used when arriving to the main land. Renji wondered briefly how often the plywood had to be changed, and hoped to see Ichigo. He wanted to ask questions.

He couldn’t find Ichigo, but found Rangiku instead. Beautiful as ever, but wearing black and looking tired. 

“Hey, Ran!” he yelled and waved. 

Rangiku saw him and nodded. She walked over and sat next to him without asking if the seat was free.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked instead. Her tone lacked true curiosity.

“Nothing too special, just wanted to clear my head. So, I took a break. What about you?”

“I’m going home.”

“Home?”

Rangiku nodded. “To Gin’s parents.”

“Do you plan for staying long?”

“Over the funeral… But I was thinking, if I can find a job, I’ll take the year off. I’d work and make some money for the next year. Start the semester over.”

Renji was surprised. Then he thought how she had been before, and no longer wasn’t.

“Do you have any idea what you’d do? For work, I mean.”

“Not really,” Rangiku shook her head, and Renji noticed her necklace, the bottle of gold. It had changed. The shape was perfectly intact, but the golden flecks now rested at the bottom.

“There’s a mall close to their place, maybe I can find something from there,” Rangiku finished her thought. She didn’t sound overly interested. “Like a sales job.”

“Doesn’t sound too cool. What happened to your necklace?”

“Dunno. I went to the gym one day, and when I left, it was like this.” Rangiku touched the pendant. “I guess the changing room was too hot for it, or something. The magic broke.”

“It’s still pretty.”

“Yeah, but I got it from him.”

Renji wanted to ask when the funeral would take place, but felt it was too insensitive. Gin’s body might still be with the police. Sometimes the family had to wait for a long time until the body was released, or that was how it worked in TV shows. Renji didn’t know it that was real or just Hollywood.

They sat in silence until Rangiku’s cellphone rang. She answered and said she was ready.

“That was my ride,” she explained unnecessarily. “Call or e-mail me every now and then, will you?”

Renji promised. Rangiku walked away.

The meeting left Renji feeling empty. The recent epiphany had given him some lift, but it was gone now, and he couldn’t help but think about Rangiku and Gin. The image of the white, blood-matted hair and blue eyes staring into nothing was vivid in his mind. He could almost smell the strange mixture of blood and locker room.

He lit a cigarette, partially to get rid of the memory and partially because the ferry was about to start boarding. No smoking on the ferry.

The smoke tasted like stale grease, but Renji smoked it to the filter. He thought about the necklace, the way the golden flakes in the bottle had danced between Rangiku’s breasts, and felt sick to his stomach. 

A present from Gin.

What did it do, and who had changed it for the copy? As pretty as the ever-moving gold had been, that alone wasn’t worth risking literally life and limb.

When walking onto the ferry, Renji pondered the pros and cons of calling Rangiku and warning her about... He didn’t even know what, but he wanted to make the call, wanted to so bad it almost hurt. But the cons, with great help of their star player, Sounding Like a Lunatic, were kicking the pros to Kingdom Come. If there was a way to put a better spin on the warning, Renji couldn’t find it.

On the positive side, she was rid of the item. She’d be ok. She’d have to be.

Renji found his seat was close the two fishermen he had watched earlier. He couldn't see their faces, much less teeth, which was a minor relief. He’d just stare again. 

The ferry engines started, and the two men kept speaking. Renji could hear the words. The men discussed their fishing boat (fishermen, he had guessed that correctly), fish prices, and when the younger man would wed. Apparently soon, as the main issue appeared to be finding a suitable venue that was not yet fully booked.

Most of the passengers hopped off on the Fish Island, leaving the ferry almost empty. Renji spent some time wondering if it returned to the main land empty, or if the ferry-driver (captain?) slept on the School Island. 

He ended up guessing it returned to the main land. There was no place to keep it on School Island, except the docks, and he had never seen it docked at night. Funny how he had never thought that before.

“Hey, do you know what’s happened here?” he later on heard someone ask a few rows back. He turned to see that someone, and vaguely remembered seeing her at school.

“What do you mean?”

“The flag’s at half-staff.”

Renji couldn’t see the flag, couldn’t even see the island. The windows on his side gave to the sea. “What, why?”

The girl sighed. “That’s what I was asking. If there’s been an accident or something.” 

“I’ve been on main land for days. How would I know?”

A younger man a couple rows in front of Renji joined in: “I hear some teacher came home from school and shot herself in her garden. Maybe it’s about that.”

“Oh, that’s sad. But thanks,” the girl answered. The information seemed to be enough to satisfy the idle curiosity, but Renji felt his heart pounding. 

A dead teacher. A woman who, if the information was good, had killed herself in the broad daylight.

That couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Suicides weren’t unheard of in the School Island. They were usually rare, although he remembered two cases from the years he had lived on the island. The first one had been a huge scandal, a pretty high-school girl whose disappearance had gained media attention. A couple days later she had been found on the mainland, a bottle of booze, empty prescription pill boxes and a suicide note next to her body. 

The parents had gone so far as to publish the note, ‘in order to make the devastating effects of bullying visible’. Renji had somewhat thought they were merely punishing who they deemed responsible, but still remembered the girl’s face, her smile and the gut-wrenching note from the newspapers.

The second case had been more muted, but closer to home. A male uni student had hung himself in his apartment, and had been found only after the neighbors had complained about the stench.

Come to think of it, why would a teacher on School Island even have a gun?

“Hey,” Renji said to a man who knew something about what had happened, “do you know where she lived?”

He said he didn’t.

The ferry docked on the School Island. When Renji stepped on the dry land, he could see the flag the girl had spoken of. It was a sorry sight, drooping in the calm weather. Like the heat had eaten away the energy it needed for fluttering.

The only places with their own gardens Renji could think were the houses next to the docks. A new kind of fear was making a nest in his belly; there were ten or so houses. In one of them lived Captain Haddock, the old water taxi owner he had spoken before traveling to the main land.

The one who had probably driven Rukia.

It wasn’t his wife, was it? Renji didn’t even know if the man was married, but he didn’t like how the odds were presenting.

Swallowing hard to get rid of the lump in his throat, Renji steeled himself against the fear. He’d have to see it. He needed to walk the road that circled around those picturesque houses and their gardens, pretty enough to be on post cards. Who knew what kind of horrors the blue walls hid?

With the other students heading towards the campus, Renji was left to walk alone. His legs felt heavy, and he wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t. 

He had to follow the lead. It wasn’t like he had leads to spare.

He walked past the first and then the second house, and saw nothing but the fruit trees and flowers in the gardens. There was a dog in the third, and it barked at him. In the fourth garden was an empty hammock and a bird bath. The fifth was empty.

It was the sixth house. The good old captain lived in the seventh.

Not his house, then. Renji felt so relieved he wanted to cry.

Sixth house, not the captain’s.

The police tape ran through the garden, in the midst of the cherry and plum trees, and on top of a flower bed. It defined a small-ish area, a rough rectangle. In the middle of it was a white sheet, too flat on the ground to hide a body of a grown woman. 

They had taken her away, Renji realized and kept staring at the scene. The flower bed closest to the sheet had pale pink and white lilies on it. Some of the flowers had red dots of varying sizes on them, and the green leaves were dotted with dark.

Blood spatter. That’s what the sheet had to be hiding.

There was nothing else to see, and no point in being seen, if he hadn’t been already.

* * *

Renji started Thurstay morning without hurry. He slept late, ate a big breakfast and went through his mail. Snail mail didn’t hold any surprises, but the ambulance ride bill made him cringe a little. He’d have to borrow money, and he had zero good excuses for it at the moment.

In his e-mails, however, was a small, pleasant surprise. For once, Renji had lucked out: the starting lectures he had thought he was skipping on had been moved to Friday due to lecturer’s ‘other responsibilities’, whatever they had been.

The other messages were Rangiku writing she was home, and Nanao, whom the lecturer had assigned as his lab partner, was asking where Renji was and if he planned bothering to start the course he had enrolled in. She had sent quite a few messages.

Renji deleted the messages, except the one Rangiku had sent. Nanao was clearly rather mad, and wouldn’t get much angrier if she had to wait a bit longer. She’d have to, because Renji had other plans.

Instead going to school, Renji headed towards the police station. 

He had never before had any reason to visit the police station on the island, but had a good idea of what to expect. The station was located in the same building with the student health center, and was too small to even have drunk tanks – if one was needed, the customer was taken to the mainland with a police boat.

Turned out the station didn’t even use queuing numbers, but a couple students stood in line. The papers they were holding showed most were handing in paperwork for passports or driving licenses. 

When the woman currently speaking to the officer left, Renji took his chances and cut in. 

“Sorry, this only takes a moment,” he said to a bored looking older student, who gave him an especially sharp eye. 

“I think I have information related to Gin Ichimaru’s murder,” he blurted to the officer without even saying hello. “This probably isn’t the right place to ask, but I can’t find a better one. Some days back, I spoke to the guy who was investigating the murder and I want to meet him again. Black hair, shoulder-length. Grey eyes. Pale skin.”

Raw curiosity flashed on the officer’s face, but she hid it immediately.

“He, did you say?”

“Yeah.”

The officer nodded. “In that case I’m sorry to tell you that such person is not involved with the case. There is a woman who matches your description quite well, but not a man.”

“Maybe it was some, uh, an underling?” Renji wasn’t well informed with inner workings of crime investigation hierarchy.

“All the men involved have short hair.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. There is no police officer of that description working with the case. However, I can get you in contact with the person responsible for the investigation, Kaya Honda.”

Renji didn’t want to involve himself with the investigation more than strictly necessary, but he agreed. Maybe Honda would help him to find the man with the Rubik’s cube. 

The officer called someone, and after a minor timetable conflict was sorted out, instructed Renji to come back to the station after lunch. Or, if he wanted to, he could, of course, wait in the station.

Renji decided to leave the station, and reluctantly agreed to write down his contact information. He considered using a fake name and number, but dismissed the thought as stupid. This was the police, not some opinionated drunk woman not understanding the word no.

Instead going to school, Renji started to walk towards the cliffs.

To his surprise, it had become overcast within the brief time he had spent indoors. The temperature hadn’t gone down, though, and moisture levels were through the roof. 

The streets were so empty it felt strange. 

Then again, most of the island population probably was at school. Those who weren’t, were getting bored with the weather already. It was now ok to stay indoors and play whatever online game they happened to like, or just to browse through memes.

Renji decided against climbing up the hill. He continue on the larger path that led to a small bay. The beach there was tiny but sandy, and much quieter than the one with the gazebo. It was a nice place to stay away from most people he knew, a good place to unwind and spend some time with one’s thoughts.

The sand was dotted with paw prints. The dog owners on the island sometimes used the bay to let the dogs swim, as dogs weren’t allowed on the main beach and the slope of the bottom was gentle. It would take a heavy rain or high waves to wash the pawn prints away.

A thunderstorm was brewing. The sparrows nesting on the cliffs were flying low, and the seagull screams were frantic. Some people said you couldn’t tell the weather by bird flight, but Renji didn’t believe that. The birds (especially the seagulls) had to feel the electricity building up in the air. 

The moments before a storm felt magical. Air squeezed into a thin layer close to the ground. All living creatures were getting ready for the downpour venturing for food but never daring to go too far from shelter.

Renji sat on a wooden bench full of graffiti and watched the sea. It was still almost calm. He tried to listen for thunder but didn’t hear anything. The horizon had disappeared to a light grayness, though. Maybe it was rain, maybe just mist and moisture. Or maybe it was windy there, and the gray was sand and dust carried with the wind.

It probably had a name, but Renji couldn’t remember it. He had always hated geography.

When lunch time was at hand, Renji returned to the police station to wait for Kaya, as instructed. He was slightly early, and killed some time by reading the pamphlets on the tables. He was halfway through one informing him of the dangers of drunk driving when a female voice called his name, “Renji Abarai?” 

He looked up from his current pamphlet and saw a woman who could have been a twin sister of the gray-eyed man. She was wearing glasses with thick black earpieces, but otherwise the descriptions were full matches, save the gender.

Renji nodded unsure about how he was expected to react. He started with closing the pamphlet and placing it back on the pile.

“My name is Kaya Honda,” the woman said, took a few steps closer and offered her hand to Renji. They shook hands briefly.

“Please come in to my office. We can chat there.”

It was evident that the office was a room originally planned for the health center. It lacked windows, but someone had tried to improve it with a potted plant. The ficus was half-dead and didn’t have many leaves left to drop.

“Please sit down,” Kaya said and carelessly pointed to a chair next to her table. Both the chair and table were exactly the same as in the health center.

A memory came to Renji so clear it was almost visual. The memory was about the first time he had sat in one of those chairs. It was his first year in uni, and as all the freshmen, he was to arrive to a health check-up. The nurse had stuck the needle in him five times, five fucking times before she had gotten a passable blood sample. After the third attempt Renji had half contemplated finding a vein for her himself.

He sit in the silence for some time. The memory made him feel slightly guilty.

“You mentioned that you might have information on a murder,” Kaya helped him.

Ah, yes. 

“Kind of… Would it be ok if I started from, uh, the beginning?”

“Of course.”  
“I met a man a couple days ago,” Renji started and did his best to describe the gray-eyed man and see if he’d get a reaction from Kaya. He didn’t see one, and missed the earphones. He hadn’t dared to take them to the police station.

“He talked to a hands-free and I thought he was talking to me, so I answered. We chatted some time and he said he was investigating the murder. Didn’t tell his name.”

Kaya nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know who he is? I wanted to talk to him.” 

It took a while before Kaya spoke. “I know who you are referring to. He has done consulting work for us. I expect you discussed the case?”

“Yeah, that’s why I want to speak with him.”

“That’s not possible, I’m afraid. But you can tell me whatever you’d tell him.”

Renji tried his best to convince Kaya about the importance of speaking directly to the consultant, but eventually failed. He fell into the plan B: finishing the discussion about Rangiku. He tried to talk a lot but say nothing, and Kaya appeared to listen without much interest.

But you never knew with the police.

“I see,” Kaya said when Renji finished talking. “Could you clarify what is the connection with the crime?”

“Fuck if I know, it was your consult who was interested, ask him,” he answered, irritated, and immediately regretted the words. She actually might ask, and mention him in the process. “Did I mention they were cousins? I suppose that’s why.”

Kaya was silent once again. She watched Renji closely, and when the silence stretched, he started to feel like he had already seen this movie. In it, the police were implanted with a liquid chip, a processor that analyzed the sensory input and gave access to information inaccessible for John and Jane Everyman.

But she wasn’t a super-cop. Renji calmed his nerves and waited.

Soon after they said goodbyes and he was free but not precisely happy to go. Holy fuck, what a bust!

Later that evening, at the hour typically calm, the wind awakened. Renji opened all the windows he could. The gusts slammed them closed and then open again. When the rain came, it fell hard on the roofs and poured in from the open windows.

Lightning came soon after. The thunder had finally made its way over the sea.

Renji liked thunderstorms. They were rare at the School Island, but the ones they got over the sea were proper storms, with lightning that danced white on the black sky and each strike made the streets bright as in daylight.

Renji’s apartment wasn’t on the top floor, but the sounds and sights opening from his windows raised goosebumps of excitement on his skin.

He left the apartment.

The air was still warm, but the rain cold. The drops were huge and soaked though his hair and clothes in seconds. Water squelched in his shoes when he jogged to the beach.

The sand was heavy and wet, and free of footprints. The volleyball net had gotten loose and banged in the wind like a sail. The sea was black as ink, its surface boiling with rain.

Renji jogged to where the sea met the sand and threw himself on the ground, the surf quickly soaking his clothes. He could feel the waves trying to lift him, to carry him away and drag to the deep. He dug his fingers into the sand and watched the sky. The sea was warm, warmer than the rain. Strike after strike hit the tip of the island, and the sound of the strikes sounded like artillery fire.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is approximately the middle-point, 10/20, although I actually decided to merge some chapters closer to the end. I've not yet decided how I'll split stuff, so I'll let it the chapter count to 20 for now.
> 
> So, it's once again time to thank polynya for beta reading this thing! Without her grammatical etc. corrections and other input this story wouldn't be what it is.
> 
> Once again this is one of my favorite chapters for no other reason than I just it :D

The Looney Tunes intro woke Renji up. He was so tired, his whole body felt like rubber, but after some trying, he found the phone. Snooze didn’t take, and the alarm switched off.

Slightly later, Renji woke up, feeling tired and thirsty. He sat up and scratched his chin. Sand and salt had stuck on the stubble and made his face itch. After dragging himself home from the beach, he barely had the energy to get out of the wet clothes.

Sand was scattered all over the bed. His hair was a tangled mess, stiff with salt and full of sand. The dirty clothes, a wet bundle on the floor, were starting to stink. Small puddles of water under the windows had dried, for the most part, but their past outlines were still visible as staining. Like the lines the police draw around bodies in movies, Renji thought hazily. There was a dead fly in the middle of the floor, too.

To put it bluntly, the apartment was beginning to resemble a pig sty, in style and smell.

And how was it possible that the heat still loomed on the island? Renji hadn’t bothered with a weather forecast but he thought that thunderstorms traveled with cool fronts. The past one clearly hadn’t.

After some time to focus his mind, Renji took a look on the clock and swore aloud. He had over-slept and would be late for school. The apartment would’ve needed more than a brief cleaning, but he was lucky that the flooring was sheet vinyl. Laminates or, gods forbid, parquet would have been ruined by now, thanks to the water.

The mess wasn’t going anywhere, so Renji settled with damage control. He picked up the wet clothes and spread them to dry. A small dump truck’s worth of sand of sand grains joined their friends on the floor.

Clean clothes were in short supply. Renji had already conducted impressive archaeological excavations in his closet. The textiles in the exposed deposits hadn’t seen daylight since he had moved in the apartment as a freshman. The years had shrunk the shirts at the shoulders, and pants around the waist.

There was no shampoo left. Renji had meant to buy it even before Rukia had showed up, but hadn’t remembered. Until now, adding water to the almost-empty bottle had done the trick, but now he had to give up. A rinse with plain water helped with the salt, but the result left room for improvement.

In the end, Renji sneaked into the lecture room about ten minutes late. He considered it an impressive feat, although he suspected that his new look of dirty hair, unshaven shin and poorly fitting clothes was more hobo than hipster. No one looked twice, except Momo and Izuru.

Nanao wasn’t even in the room.

Momo and Izuru sat on their preferred seats at the end of the room. Renji joined them.

“The attendance list passed,” Momo whispered, turning around.

“Did I miss something else?”

“Not really, we know this already.”

Turned out Momo was right. The laboratory course was mandatory for those who majored in environmental engineering, and for them it was one of the first laboratory work courses. As many others did, Renji had chosen the course because he liked to do things with his hands. Being familiar with the theory hadn’t hampered his interest at all.

The lecturer was currently describing the formatting he wanted to see in the reports. It was similar with many others Renji was familiar with, the main differences being in the pagination.

Renji scratched his chin. He craved coffee and a smoke, both of which he had skipped. How stupid, he though, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had arrived a few more minutes late.

“And please do remember, I don’t want to see one single report with botched formatting,” the lecturer said. “It will just be extra work for you and, more importantly, extra work for me. Is that clear, young mister with the black metal T-shirt?”

The young mister said it was. The lecturer was starting to warm up.

“As those who have actually read the description know that the first thing we’ll do is that we’ll get familiar with heat engines, Carnot cycle and exergy. The exercise itself is not especially difficult, but I recommend you familiarize yourselves with the topic. Experience on my part says that exergy is something you guys often struggle with.”

Renji agreed silently. The lecturer went on: “I suspect the problem is that the students think in ideal terms. However, we need to keep in mind that there is energy all around us. It’s just that not all of it can be used to, say, generate electricity.”

The lecturer continued by splitting the room in two and asking if there was energy in both sides. The students agreed there was. 

“Now, if we take a turbine and place it in the middle, how much electricity are we going to get? Any guesses? Lady with the bright red shirt?”

Renji didn’t see her face, but heard surprise in her voice. “It depends on what we are going to feed to it?”

“We are trying to use the energy from the air all around us.”

“It’s not even moving.”

“The air, you mean?”

“That, too, but I meant the turbine.”

The lecturer nodded. “The lady in red shirt is correct. We are surrounded by air and the different forms of energy it contains, but we wouldn’t be able to use the energy in the described setting. The reason, besides the obvious issue of lack of movement, is that the left and right side are in a thermodynamic equilibrium. We do not have available energy, which, by the way, is a synonym for exergy.”

The lecturer gave a few examples on what could be done to change the thermodynamic equilibrium, and finished: “Of course you need to keep in mind that the law of conservation of energy hasn’t gone anywhere: while we can’t create the energy from nowhere, we can transform it from one form to another.”  
The story went on. Slowly but steadily the lecturer got to Carnot cycle and explained how loss of exergy contributed to increase of entropy. Renji tried to draw a wild board piglet who was wearing earphones. The drawing wasn’t very good.

When the lecturer finished, Renji walked to him and added his name to the attendance list. Momo and Izuru waited for him in the back.

“Did you eat already?” he asked.

Izuru nodded. “Yeah. You?”

“Nope. I overslept.”

Momo frowned. She was worried, Renji could tell.

“Are you sure you are ok? If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t look too good.”

“Gee, thanks. Of course I’m ok.”

“No migraine?”

“No… No drama, no nothing. I just didn’t have time to wash any clothes after I came back, and I was up late. I know I look like a hobo crawling up from some ditch. Can’t help it right now.”

Momo didn’t seem to believe him. Izuru did, and gave him a small laugh.

“You didn’t happen to enjoy the company of the opposite gender?”

“What’s--” Renji began, but remembered his previous white lie. “Yeah, actually, if you really need to know.”

The frown on Momo’s face disappeared. “It went that well? That’s great! Is she still in here? Would you like us to meet her?”

“She left just before the lectures. Had her own responsibilities on the main land.”

“Well, next time then. What’s her name?”

“Kaya Honda,” Renji said the first name that popped his mind before realizing that Momo had to know who was investigating Gin’s death. She had talked with the police. Likely with Kaya, in fact.

To his relief, Momo didn’t react to the name. “Please tell us everything!”

Renji managed a grin. “A gentleman never tells.”

The answer made Izuru laugh. Even Momo smiled.

“Not everything like that! How is she? What does she study, or do?”

“She’s really short, dark hair, pretty like you wouldn’t believe.” The non-existing girlfriend was starting to get way too much attention. “Can’t you come to lunch? I’m super hungry.”

“We ate already,” Izuru reminded him.

“Come for the company? I’m starving here.”

Neither of them had time. Both were meeting with their lab work partners to work on the literature survey part of the report. Renji felt more relieved than disappointed.

* * *

After leaving the school, Renji went to the market, but ended in walking in circles and adding things to his cart almost randomly. He hadn’t made a shopping list, but remembered to take a table fan without it.

Next to a shelf of protein bars was a man who Renji knew through Shuhei. Tetsuzaeman, a PhD student who seemed to love two things in the world: mathematical modeling and pumping iron.

They weren’t close at all, but Renji remembered Tetsuzaemon well, and even liked him. Talking with him was easy. When Renji didn’t feel like filling the silence, he just had to nod in the right places and listen when Tetsuzaemon spoke of his modeling tasks, or pumping iron and related activities. It was nice to hear of things other than legendary drinking binges.

“Hi,” Renji greeted him and parked his cart next to the protein bar shelf.

Tetsuzaemon looked up from the ingredient list he was reading with care, and looked around in slight surprise. Then he noticed Renji.

“Oh, hi. How’s it going?”

“Good, business as usual.”

“Have you thought about the gym thing?”

Renji didn’t even remember ‘the gym thing’, but could guess what it was about, and used the most common excuse: “I don’t have the money right now, or time.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Tetsuzaemon said. His tone hinted he meant it. “I’m sure the guys would like you in there. Hey, we are having a housewarming party this evening, the gym guys and some others are coming, now that Lisa isn’t home. Do you want to come? Shuhei said he’ll be there, too.” 

“You’ve moved? I didn’t even know you were together with someone. But, uh, congrats.”

“Thanks, but it isn’t new or anything. We’ve been together almost three years.”

“I’m not sure I’ll have time, but I’ll come if I can,” Renji said, trying to remember someone called Lisa. He didn’t have any idea who she was, but wasn’t surprised. Tetsuzaemon was a bit older than he, and hung with a different bunch.  
After sharing his new address, Tetsuzaemon continued reading the ingredients lists.

Renji continued with his groceries and imagined how Tetsuzaemon’s girlfriend was. Maybe some fitness chick, or a student, or someone who couldn’t wait to have at least three kids and a dog. Their address could go with any of the theories. The houses in their area were new, apartments roomy and rents high.  
The groceries cost more than he had money in his account, so he used his credit card.

Backpack on his back, a twelve-pack of beer in one hand and the fan in the other Renji started to walk home. Sooner rather than later he fantasized about throwing the fan or the beer in the hawthorn hedge he walked past. Foodstuff was heavy enough as it was, and the box was uncomfortable to carry.

Renji stopped around the midpoint, sat on the beer pack with a cold Fanta and took a cigarette-length break. A couple of passer-bys gave him long stares. He felt a bit like a circus animal, but couldn’t figure out what the interest was about. The zipper of his pants was closed, and there was no bird shit on his hair. He checked twice to make sure.

The first thing Renji did at home was to put the food in the fridge. The second thing was to plug the fan in and switch it on. The third thing was calling to Ichigo, but the kid’s phone wasn’t on. The situation didn’t change by continuing to call.

Ichigo was probably at school, Renji told himself a few times, no point worrying about it. But despite his best efforts, he couldn’t shake the worry – the dead teacher hadn’t worked at uni, that much he had learned during the day. As there were only the high school and the university on the island, Ichigo probably knew more about the teacher.

Renji picked up the clothes scattered around the apartment. He crammed them into the laundry basket and headed downstairs, to the laundry room shared by everyone in the house.

Renji disliked laundries as a rule, but the one in his building was one of the worst. The washing machines were ancient, tumble-dryers non-existant. Behind the machines was an open chute the machines emptied into. The maintenance company was supposed to clean the chute yearly, but Renji had never seen it clean. As far as he knew, the gray crud of textile dust and soap scum contained traces of sperm, vomit and every other possibly bodily fluid generously donated by many generations of students.

On top of a reservation list was a few unpaired socks, stretched underpants and a pink bra with an underwire poking out. As usual, the afternoon slots were booked full and the program wouldn’t have time to finish before the apartment B12 would start their turn. Renji put his clothes in and started the program anyway. The machine had, as Shuhei had put it back in the day, more buttons and levers than the Mir space-fucking-station, but the operation manual had become familiar over the years.

Renji wrote an apologetic post it note with a sad face for the next user, and went back up.

Ichigo’s phone was still off. Maybe he was attending an after-school activity? He didn’t seem like an after-school activity kind of guy, but one never knew. Or maybe he was still at school?

Feeling like he was grasping straws, Renji stopped calling. When he closed his eyes, he saw red-on-pink lilies, and the white sheet on green grass.

In his e-mail was a message from Nanao. She apologized briefly for her failure to be present at the lecture. Headache, the message said, Nanao always had a headache after a thunderstorm.

Renji typed a short answer and agreed to meet her next day, at 12:00 in the library. They’d start compiling the literature survey. 

Before he could compile anything, he had to have something written down.

School work didn’t hold his attention for long. Despite the fan, the apartment was too hot for thinking, and the fan made horrible noises. Clearly there were drawbacks to buying cheapest model. Under its hum, he could hear seagull screams, and the sharp chattering of sparrows. The tree tops were completely still.

He called Ichigo, whose phone was off.

The formulas and words on the computer screen blended into an illegible mess. Lack of caffeine made his head ache. He brewed a cup and drank about half of it. It was way too hot to drink warm drinks, and the coffee had a strange, unpleasantly tangy taste.

He called Ichigo. The phone was still off.

Fuck that, he’d go to see the damn brat. Maybe Ichigo had just dropped the phone into a toilet and was currently playing Counter Strike without a worry in the world.

Renji showered and changed into clean clothes. These clothes were old as well, and the shorts were uncomfortably tight, but the t-shirt had been slightly too loose back then. Now it fit almost well.

The streets were usually quiet. A few pieces of paper littered the pavement. Renji picked them up, but they were of no interest: an old math test, a shopping list, a faded receipt from the kiosk, that sort of things. 

Someone walked a dog past him.

When he reached Ichigo’s building, Renji realized he didn’t remember the apartment number. He rang the doorbells of everyone who shared the floor with Ichigo, but no one answered. He kept ringing and waited. Fear was starting to build up in his stomach. 

After some time, he could see the movement in the stairs, but the relief died in a split-second. It wasn’t Ichigo. It was a woman in a red and yellow flower-patterned dress. The print was fugly, and she seemed irritated.

The woman didn’t open the door. She had to yell for her voice to go through the glass. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

Renji, too, yelled to make himself heard: “Trying to find a friend, Ichigo! Sorry! Where is he?”

“Clearly not at home! Stop ringing!”

“Sorry! Have you seen him? Hair like carrots?”

“Not today! Just call him! Stop with the doorbells! Or I’ll call the cops!” 

Renji tried to continue the discussion, but the woman gave him the finger, walked back to the staircase and vanished from sight. Renji considered continuing to ring the other doorbells, but didn’t know what apartment the woman had come from, and didn’t want to end up explaining the situation to the cops.

The fear still lingered in his belly, and the image of the dark red on-pink-petals danced in his mind’s eye, but the discussion had somewhat calmed him. If something truly horrible had happened, the police would have been there, right? The cranky woman in the ugly dress would have known. Lack of horrible news had to be good news.

Once again, Renji found himself in a situation he couldn’t do anything about. He’d get ahold of Ichigo later on.

Going back home to the school work didn’t feel like a valid option. Renji remembered Tetsuzaemon’s invite and continued towards his place. It was a short walk, even on the island standards, but the neighborhood was different from the one Renji or Ichigo lived in. The houses were newer, neater. The balconies were glass-paneled and many had flowers on them. There were even cars on the parking lot.

This was the neighborhood for the better folk: teachers, professors, researchers…And, obviously, some PhD students as well. 

Finding the right place was easy, but before Renji ringed the doorbell, he realized he was early. Tetsuzaemon hadn’t told him exact time, but had mentioned evening. It wouldn’t do, to be the first one at present. Maybe even Lisa was still home.

Renji turned around and started to walk back. He had left in such hurry he had left his phone, but he trusted that Shuhei was home. Shuhei was always home, except when he was at work or partying.

Shuhei lived in one of the older neighborhoods. Renji felt much more home there. If the apartments had balconies, they were free of glass, and full of snow during the winter months. Every balcony had an empty jam or olive jar for cigarette butts. The cupboard next to the trash bin was always reserved for empty bottles and cans, to be returned when the smell of stale beer became unbearable, or in a bout of acute shortness of cash.

Shuhei’s doorbell was one Renji didn’t have to guess about. He rang three times: two brief rings followed by one long. He always rang like that. That was how Shuhei, Kira and Momo knew who was trying to get in even if he had failed to call ahead. 

The lock made a quiet click when it opened. The buzzer hadn’t worked in years.

Renji climbed the stairs to the third floor. Shuhei’s door was already unlocked. Renji opened it without a knock or hesitation.

“Yo,” he half-yelled and closed the door behind him. The place was much like his own. The shoes were left wherever they had landed after being kicked off, and winter jackets still hung in the coat rack.

“Yo,” Shuhei answered. He was on his knees on a sofa, resting his elbows on its back rest and eying Renji. “What are you doing in here? You usually call before you come.”

“Yeah, I just left kind of spur of the moment. The phone’s at home.”

“Is everything ok? You look strange.”

Renji shrugged and kicked his shoes off. “New clothes, or more like old. I was in the main land, didn’t do laundry yet.”

“Momo said you were with some woman and behaved strangely.”

“Momo’s behaving strangely, I bet it’s that murder. She’s seeing ghosts and monsters everywhere. Aren’t you going to offer me any refreshments?”

Shuhei grinned. “Servants get paid these days. I don’t remember getting any checks from you recently. There is beer in the fridge, and a carton of iced tea, too. I trust you can use the coffee maker. Help yourself.”

The tea had expired a couple months ago, so Renji decided that a beer was probably the healthier choice. He also found a half of a pizza, which he took out and microwaved before joining Shuhei in the living area.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt,” Renji said when he saw a laptop computer on the sofa table. Next to it was an opened can of beer, which a wasp circled around.

Shuhei shooed the wasp. “Damn things, there is a nest above my balcony… I was just reading comics and getting ready for the evening. I saved some vacation time for this exact purpose.”

“Great plans, eh?”

Shuhei gave a lengthy explanation of what comics he planned on reading while drinking beer and sun-bathing. 

“I thought you said you’ll never again drink when it’s this hot,” Renji teased.

“What, I’d never say such a thing! Drinking in this weather is the best-est. When it’s hot, I’m already thirsty.”  
Shuhei seemed to be serious, but Renji laughed anyway.

A few hours, beers and Tekken matches later the duo left for Tetsuzaemon’s place. Renji couldn’t say he was feeling good, but being tipsy and in company eased his worry over Ichigo. He wanted to call the kid, but couldn’t do so with Shuhei around.

Tetsuzaemon was ready for the company. Turned out he and Lisa lived on the first floor, and instead of a balcony they had a tiny yard with a hedgerow. Someone, presumably Lisa, had planted flowers, and there was a small gas grill.

“Great digs,” Shuhei said, slurring slightly. “I wouldn’t complain if they renovated mine to be like this.”

“Me neither,” Renji agreed. “But there’s a perk above all else: air conditioning.”

Tetsuzaemon laughed. “True, a man needs something stronger than water to deal with this weather without one… Seems like at least one of you agrees.”

Shuhei did, and shared his opinion about why the heat wave was the best time to get drunk. Tetsuzaemon complained that the weather wasn’t good for his bodybuilding. Renji listened quietly and hoped someone else would join them soon. The relative ease he had felt with Shuhei was dissipating fast, and he felt awkward in the apartment of someone he didn’t know.

“By the way, Renji told he didn’t even know you were with Lisa,” Shuhei said to Tetsuzaemon, obviously amused. “How do you think that’s possible? You don’t ever speak about anything than work, bodybuilding and her.”

Tetsuzaemon didn’t seem to mind the teasing. “I guess it’s because he’s got the patience to listen me talking about the first two. I asked if he’d come to the gym.”

Renji didn’t see anything funny in it, but Shuhei laughed out loud. “Renji? Why the fuck would you ask him?”

“Why wouldn't I? He said he’d consider.”

Shuhei turned to Renji. “Is he being serious? You thought you’d go?”  
For Renji, the whole discussion sounded strange. Usually Shuhei wasn’t one to cause awkward situations, assuming he wasn’t drunk enough to be legless. Something was off. On top of that, Renji still didn’t have the original memory of Tetsuzaemon asking him to the gym.

“I don’t have money or time,” he repeated the previous answer. “If I did, I might go, could be good for the health… Hey Tetsuzaemon, do you mind if I put a couple beers in the freezer?”

Tetsuzaemon ok’d it, and the topic changed. Renji however couldn’t shake off the thought that something important was horribly, terribly off with Shuhei.

He kept thinking that even after Tetsuzaemon’s other friends started to come by. Some were researchers, some older students, and many were his friends from the gym. They spoke of their models and the protein powders they liked, and what kind of training equipment they’d like to see in the gym. Occasionally they spoke of weather and praised the great invention of air conditioning units.

Shuhei chatted with the researcher and his fellow PhD students. Renji tried his best, but couldn’t quite find a topic to join in. Most of the time he sat quietly and wished he had his earphones with him. He still didn’t dare to wear them in public on the island.

He tried to alleviate the sense of being in a wrong place by drinking, but it didn’t work well. The beautifully decorated apartment and tiny white and blue flowers ( _Lobelia erinus_ , the label said) were starting to resemble a set of a horror movie.

He just had to get out.

“Half past ten, it’s getting late,” Renji begin to excuse himself. “I should be going.”

“Why, the night’s young. Hardly a teenager. Into underage drinking,” Shuhei said rather drunkenly. “We used to drink till morning in the old days.”

“I have schoolwork to do. In the good old days we never did… Or we didn’t give a shit even if we we had,” Renji said. His attempt to grin felt more like a facial cramp.

Shuhei couldn’t disagree on that. Renji collected the remaining beers quickly, thanked Tetsuzaemon and said a few nice things about the apartment. Most of them were about lobelias. Nothing fit in his head except lobelias, and the need to be somewhere else.

It was easier to be and breathe outside. The darkness was velvety, calming. Renji couldn’t see the sea, but the weakest breeze carried a touch of it.

After walking a couple hundred meters he sat on the asphalt, lit a cigarette and opened a beer. His hands were shaking.

After the second smoke he got his nerves under some control, and cursed Shuhei in his mind. When had Shuhei become such a tactless fool? And had Momo always been such a worry-pants, blabbering his private business to everyone? Fuck if he didn’t deserve a break from his dearest friends, the mother hen and the duo of damned dipsomaniacs.

In a sudden bout of anger Renji threw the almost full beer can onto the closest car. The can hit a window, which broke.

It didn’t pay to stay and wait for someone to notice. Renji took a new can, opened it and continued his walk like nothing had happened. He felt bad about both – breaking the window and not leaving his contact info – but the guilt, anger and every other possible emotion was quickly sucked into a vortex of not giving a shit.

Feeling only emptiness (the sweet, blessed emptiness), Renji walked the streets. First, he went to the harbor, and found the kiosk closed. He walked the road that went past the dead teacher's garden, but the police tape and the sheet were gone. It was way too dark to see, but he guessed the thunderstorm had washed the blood from the flowers.

He continued to the market, which was, of course, closed, and from there to the beach. He dropped his belongings and walked into the sea.

The storm had cooled the water somewhat. When Renji walked back to the dry land, he was actually cold for the first time in days. It was such a great feeling he enjoyed it by laying on the sand, drinking beer and smoking a cigarette. The only lights he could see were the stars, the milky way and the glow of his cigarette.

The sky was dark on the School Island, not the sickly murky orange it was in the cities. That was just light pollution, Renji knew, and the lack of it in School Island. Despite that, the stars were magical.  
The quiet was almost perfect, and it lulled Renji to sleep.

“Are you ok?” an unknown male voice asked. Renji had an inkling that someone had just poked his ribs with a tip of a shoe, and it took a while before he remembered which muscles he was supposed to use to speak.

“Just fell asleep for a while.”

The man had company, a woman as unknown to Renji than the man was. A couple enjoying a romantic walk on a beach, he though, although the thoughts felt like they existed outside of him. 

“We just thought we’d make sure. Keeping in mind you were lying on the sand. Do you need help to get home?”

Renji sat up and shook his head. His hair and clothes were full of sand. Again. “It’s under control.”

“We’ll continue, then.” Despite his words, the man didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. He was starting to get on Renji’s nerves, although he admitted that checking on him was a nice thing to do.

“It’s cool, really,” he said and proved it by collecting his things, standing up and starting to walk away. He could feel the stares on his back for a while, but when he looked back, no one was there.

He tried to call Ichigo. The phone was off.

It wasn’t a coincidence that he walked to Ichigo’s house first. Lights were on in some apartments, but most windows were just dark squares against the gray concrete. He didn’t dare ring the doorbells, and after going around the house, he continued on to the house Ichigo’s friends lived in.

Spot and the two girls, whose names escaped him. He remembered the apartment number from their earlier visit to take Spot out, but guessed the girls were asleep. Almost all the windows were lightless. 

The toothbrush-slash-melody box was in there, in their bathroom cupboard. The box’s melody was etched in his mind, the sad notes chiming in minor.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I missed a Tuesday. I wasn't on my computer, then there was the service break and I decided that I'd just skip a week. But now I'm back, tormenting poor Renji. I hope you are having better time with this than he is :P

Renji had forgotten to put the phone’s alarm clock on and slept until power drill noises and occasional hammering sounds woke him. The couple next door had recently had a baby, so Renji guessed that the new father for the first time was putting furniture together. 

He felt pretty bad. He was tired, achy all over and couldn’t shake off an intangible sense of something dreadful being about to happen. And he was also about to be late. Nanao would be angry. 

He hated being hungover. 

Renji started with a quick shower, after which he realized his clothes were still in the laundry room. He gave it a fifty-fifty chance whether the good people of B21 had kindly let the program finish, or if they had taken the time that was rightfully theirs. If the latter was true, he’d find his clothes wet, soapy and stinking in the sink.

He knew what he’d have done, and hoped that the good people of B21 were nicer.

The clothes were on the clothes lines, washed and dry. Renji grabbed them without caring to fold them and ran upstairs as fast as his current form of clothing (a towel around his waist) allowed.

Later at school, Renji found that Nanao had waited for him in the library. 

That was almost disappointing. Nanao was just as angry as he had expected, if not angrier. 

It didn’t take long before Nanao had to leave to attend another meeting. 

The work hadn’t proceeded much, but Renji was relieved to know how the work was divided. He promised to do better in the future. He even stayed in the library after Nanao was gone, but didn’t feel like doing much work, physically or mentally. His body was pretty much screaming for food, coffee and smokes, although not necessarily in that exact order. 

He put the books back on the shelves and walked out, visiting the coffee machine on the way by.

The smoking area was stupidly busy considering it was Saturday. Renji, whose thoughts were drifting back to Ichigo and Orihime’s toothbrush-slash-melody box, had hoped to find it quieter. It wouldn’t do to call Ichigo, with so many pairs of ears around him.

He ate a quick and very late lunch at the cafeteria and returned to the library. He didn’t even pick one single handbook from the shelf before deciding the schoolwork wasn’t happening.

Back at home, Renji called Ichigo before even kicking his shoes off. He immediately felt his hopes getting up. 

The line was busy. 

The phone still fucking _existed_. Having that proven was a huge improvement from the previous day.

Renji kept calling. Whoever Ichigo was talking with clearly had a lot to say, but the call had to finish at some point.

It did.

“Ichigo Kurosaki,” the kid answered. His voice was strangely formal, like he was expecting someone else to call. Someone important.

“It’s me, Renji. I’ve been trying to call you. I think we should meet.”

Ichigo didn’t relax. If anything, his voice tensed up even more. “Why?”

“Uh, I’d like to bounce some ideas around. About finding Rukia.”

“Sorry, I can’t. I’m not even on the island.”

“On Monday, then?” Renji asked, feeling suddenly nervous. When Ichigo had stopped talking, the silence was too silent. This wasn’t someone saying he happened to be someplace else right now, but if you waited for a minute, thigs would be back to normal.

“I won’t be there on Monday either,” Ichigo said, and his voice grew quieter. “That teacher who got-- offed herself? She was my homeroom teacher. I won’t be coming back any time soon.”

“What’s that to do with it?” Renji asked, and realized immediately after he should have said he was sorry. He even was sorry, kind of, in the same distant way he was sorry to hear about lives lost in earthquakes, terrorist attacks and accidents of all sorts. It didn’t really touch him, didn’t make it through.

Ichigo didn’t sound offended. “It’s super difficult to explain.”

“Try me.”

“I can’t talk for long.” 

Renji believed that. He could hear someone calling Ichigo’s name in the background. It was a male voice, asking who Ichigo was talking to. The voice was faint, so it wasn’t easy to tell, but the man didn’t sound angry. The kid probably wasn’t in too much trouble.

“That’s my dad,” Ichigo explained briefly. The explanation was followed by the sound of a palm covering the microphone, and Ichigo’s slightly muffled voice yelling: “A friend from school, won’t take long!”

Ichigo continued: “Hear that? If you have something to ask, shoot.”

“’kay. Does Orihime have an item? Like your mom’s clock?” 

Ichigo took some time to answer, but this time the silence felt baffled rather than strained. “Why would she?”

“No idea about why, but I think she has a music box that looks like a toothbrush.”

Renji tried to think Ichigo’s thoughts, but couldn’t. It was like his mind met nothing, like there was nothing that could hold anything. 

He really, truly hoped it was because they were talking on the phone.

“How the hell would something like that even work?” Ichigo asked. On the background the man was speaking to Ichigo again, this time to tell him to hurry with the call. 

“I’ve never got that kind of… vibes of her,” Ichigo almost whispered. “Listen, I’ve to go. I don’t think we can talk too soon again, dad’s really freaked out by Miss Watanabe and we are waiting for some calls. I gotta go now, bye!”

Ichigo hung up before Renji even had time to say his goodbyes. He listened the line for some time, then closed it and stared at the phone in confusion. Nothing about the call made any sense.

Except the dead teacher, Miss Watanabe. There was the connection. Of course there had to be a fucking connection.

Silent acceptance took over Renji. He had known it. He had known since yesterday, when he hadn’t been able to call Ichigo. He had known in the morning. This was the dreadful thing he had been waiting for.

It could have been a lot worse, he supposed. Ichigo could have been taken in as a suspect, or been killed, or disappeared. Him being home wasn’t the horror story Renji had half expected, but he could still sense things brewing.

He put the phone away and kicked his shoes off, still thinking about the phone call.

Ichigo wasn’t waiting for some important calls. The phone had been switched off. Which parts had been lies, and why? What about Orihime and her item?

Renji swore out loud and tried to find some comfort in knowing Ichigo was ok. Only it didn’t work. Had the man even been Ichigo’s dad, or was he a kidnapper who had listened every word of the call and told Ichigo what to say?

No, no. That was stupid. Probably many high schoolers had travelled home after the teacher had died. Parents wanted to check on their kids, and so forth. It was just natural.

If Ichigo had been kidnapped, his family would miss him, right? Then his friends would know it soon. Renji could ask Orihime and the other girl, Tatsuki. He’d just wait a day or two to make sure the information had time to trickle down. 

On the brighter side, he knew the dead teacher’s name.

Hours of googling her name later, Renji had learned only that Miss Watanabe had been a macramé enthusiast who had a huge talking parrot called Tango. The article didn’t mention what kind of a parrot Tango was, but it had a photograph of a smiling middle-aged woman with a green parrot and huge, contest-winning macramé wall-hanging.

It wasn’t exactly the information Renji was after, and the smile made him feel sick. It was a proud, happy smile, not that of someone who was about to shoot herself dead. He couldn’t make himself believe the woman had actually done it, although the newspaper was a couple years old and one never knew what a smile was hiding.

After reading the article Renji couldn’t continue with the task. It wasn’t just blood-on-petals any longer, it was a real woman who loved her parrot, and spent lonely evenings tying knots on linen thread. He couldn’t stop thinking whether Miss Watanabe had shot herself in head – probably, and if so, what did that smiling face look like now?

He needed something to distract him from the thought.

He decided on cooking. He had forgotten a lot when buying groceries, and bought some items he couldn’t use, but there was enough to make a risotto.

In his distracted state Renji made more than one small error following the recipe. The food was watery and the protein was overcooked. Worse still, there was the strangely familiar, tangy, extremely unpleasant taste. The same taste than in the coffee he had brewed the day before, Renji realized. Something in his fridge was giving out bad taste.

Whatever the source was, he couldn’t find it by smelling and tasting. Everything that was openalready tasted bad. There was only one thing to do, and it was to throw away everything that wasn’t still sealed, and to wash the whole fridge with soda and then vinegar. Only the future would tell whether that helped or not.

After he was done with the cleaning, Renji remembered the risotto, and ate it despite the taste. He picked the coffee box from the trash and brewed a cup of coffee, which tasted almost the same as the food. Watching cute cat videos helped him swallow most of the coffee, although some of the vids starred ferrets instead. He had nothing against ferrets.

Later, Renji realized it was starting to get dark. What was left of his coffee was cold, or as luke-warm as it got in the hot apartment.

One more day laid to waste. 

He poured the coffee out, changed into his running gear and went out to jog. The evening was quiet, no one in sight. Running was easier than he had expected, and closer at the sea he could hear the distant sound of fishing boat motors. 

The fishers were returning home, or maybe they were only just heading out to the sea. Renji admitted readily that he didn’t know much about fishing. Either way, it sounded almost like home. He felt like the island was changing with darkness. Whether it became more real or unreal was difficult to tell, or if the change was for the better or worse. 

* * *

Renji was dreaming. He knew it for a while, but then somehow forgot it. He walked the streets, trying to find students affairs’ office, but couldn’t remember where it was or how it looked. He didn’t even remember why he was trying to find it, but it was very important.

He wasn’t even on the School Island anymore. He was in a large town, and every time he turned, no matter it he took right or left, there was a new street. He thought all the streets were identical, but he wasn’t sure. All that existed was what he could see. His body was heavy, and forcing it to move took every ounce of his willpower.

There was a wallet on the ground. Renji picked it up. The fabric was reddish brown Mars camo, and he didn’t open the thing, but knew it was Tatsuki’s.

He tried to call her but didn’t know how to use his phone. Tatsuki needed the wallet soon, but the students affairs’ office was about to close too. It was getting seriously stressful.

The sky between the houses was grey but free from clouds, sun, moon and stars. The light was grey, and the town was free from shadows. Renji forgot the faces of passersby the second they walked past him.

Renji stopped one of the passersby and asked for help with his phone. He didn’t show the wallet, but the grey person in front of him knew what it was about.

“That’s not Tatsuki’s, it’s her dad’s.”

Renji continued his search. Tatsuki’s father worked in a hauling terminal, which Renji had to find. He was in so much hurry that the stress was already turning to borderline despair. The hauling terminal had to be somewhere far, and if there were any buses, he didn’t know anything of their running times.

He found the right terminal and knocked on the door. No one answered, but he was able to open the door. Men in grey uniforms turned to look at him. Their hands were dirty.

Renji offered them the wallet, which now was a pastel blue plush cow.

“He left to go home,” one of the men said. “There’s no tomorrow in this place. You’ll have to go and get it to him by yourself.”

At that moment Renji remembered it was all a dream. He could do anything he wanted to.

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said and chose to throw the cow on the floor. It squeaked like a rubber duck.

He stood on balcony of a tall building and was holding a cup of tea and watching fireworks. It was a mid-winter night, but the snow was grey with dust and pollution. The sky was dark, but lithium, barium and copper painted it with red, green and blue.

Renji jolted up without knowing what the noise was.

It was his phone, he realized after couple seconds and scrambled to see who was calling.

It was Nanao. Renji didn’t answer but felt like he could have kissed her constantly dissatisfied frown just because she had him woken up. He couldn’t shake the emotional scenery of the dream, but just being awake was a relief.

He should have changed the sheets in the evening. The bed was so full of sand the grains stuck on his sweaty skin. 

He didn’t change the sheets, but brushed most of the sand on the floor. 

Sand grains were latched on his palm. Some of the sand was white and shiny. Quartz, he thought, but didn’t know for sure. Identifying minerals was way too similar to geography. Other grains were black or dark red, or colored like toffee cheesecake. 

Colored like sand was a funny phrase, Renji thought. When you got close enough, sand wasn’t sand-colored. Besides, there were white beaches too. Waves, fish, climate change and whoever the fuck knew whatever the fuck wore heavy on the corals, grinding their skeletons to fine white sand tourists liked to ogle like idiots. 

Then there was that black sand, basalt. Lava that had flown free and burned to death everything in vast areas, then solidified to black lifeless field and finally turned to sand. 

Despite the heat, Renji felt goosebumps forming on his skin. The thought of tectonic plates floating on molten rock had always made him uncomfortable. He hurried to shower, and allowed his thoughts wonder.

It didn’t take long before he was thinking about the dream again.

He just couldn’t wait a few days to see Orihime and Tatsuki. He had to go there. Now.

He clothed himself, skipped both breakfast and coffee and left.

Turned out Orihime and Tatsuki were not at home. For a second Renji thought they were at school, but it was Sunday, so that couldn’t be it. He felt sorry for Spot, who probably was stuck in the stupidly hot apartment. Renji himself felt all sweaty and just generally bad, even after walking in the shadowed side of the street when possible. Why hadn’t he brought the water bottle?

Sooner or later Orihime had to come to take Spot out. Then he’d speak out.

He found a relatively shaded place on the lawn and sat down. It didn’t take for long before he found himself thinking of tectonic plates again. Was the School Island volcanic? It didn’t look like that, but Renji remembered a documentary he had watched with Shuhei a few years back, when they had been too hungover to do anything else. The narrator had informed him that if the tip of the volcano remained submerged, an island could grow on it.

He tried to remember how and why the island would just grow out, but couldn’t. He probably had been asleep when that part had been covered.

Time was crawling. The ground was dry enough to lie down, so Renji did. There were tiny flowers amidst the grass, not clovers but the ones that looked like miniature daisies. Some had a touch of purple on their petals.

When he turned on his back and watched the sky, he was pleasantly surprised to see its pale but bright blueness. The sun had just hidden itself behind a single white cloud, and light flowed past its lacy lining. 

The light reminded Renji of a magnesium flare, and when he closed his eyes, he could still see the purple, unformed blob.

Damn, he was thirsty.

Tatsuki got back home before Orihime. She went in and came back almost immediately with Spot, who panted like crazy but wiggled his tail and seemed to be having hard time controlling his joy.

When she returned to the house, Spot was wet all over. He panted less but seemed as happy as before. The dog and the girl walked past Renji without paying any attention to him.

Not long after that Orihime returned home. 

When Renji saw her, he stood up. Tiny dots of color danced in his vision and his legs felt like rubber.

“Hi,” he heard Orihime’s voice but couldn’t see her behind all the dots. “Renji, was it? Are you ok?”

It was a question Renji had heard a lot lately, but this time he understood why Orihime was asking it. He bet his face was whiter that one of the clouds that had cowardly run out of the reach of the merciless sun.

“Yeah, just stood up too fast. Thanks, though.”

“Are you waiting for someone?”

The dots were starting to fade. “Yeah. You, actually.”

“Oh?” Her voice carried a touch of healthy suspicion and naïve delight. Renji picked up the tone easily.

“Uh, sorry, I sound like some crazy stalker or something, please don’t misunderstand. I, uh, was in your apartment briefly, when Ichigo took Spot out. Just enough time to get a bottle of water for him, and I happened to hear a melody.”

“A melody?” Orihime sounded slightly confused, but not spooked.

“Yeah, it’s familiar for me, from when I was little. I’d like to know more about it. It goes something like,” Renji said and tried to hum the melody.

A smile lit up Orihime’s face. “Oh that! It’s a music box of sorts. Sometimes it starts to play by itself.”

She knit her brow, and her smile faded. “But I don’t know what that song is. I’ve never thought about the name.”

Renji nodded. “Would you mind if I recorded that a bit? I have a friend who might know, but he says I hum like a constipated hippopotamus.”

Orihime giggled, seemed unsure for a while and then made up her mind. Her face seemed to announce every thought she was having.

“I guess it’s ok. Please come in.”

Renji followed Orihime in and was greeted by Spot and Tatsuki. Spot would have liked to jump on him, but Tatsuki stopped the dog.

“Just ignore him,” Tatsuki said. “When he’s calmed down, he can come and greet you. If that’s ok.”

Renji nodded and took off his shoes. The apartment was almost as clean as the last time, but there was some sand on the floor. Spot had probably carried it in in his fur and paws.

Tatsuki calmed Spot down quite fast. When she let the dog loose, Renji kneeled down to let Spot sniff and greet him. The wildly wagging tail was probably moving air better than Renji’s cheap fan, and it sure was quieter.

Spot lost his interest quite fast, returned to his toys and left the humans to mind their business. Orihime briefly explained Renji’s story to Tatsuki and led him to the bathroom. She opened the cupboard and found it in perfect order, but without the toothbrush.

“Tatsuki must have moved it,” Orihime said without any worry in her face or voice, and raised her voice enough to call Tatsuki.

It didn’t take long before Tatsuki’s head bobbed to the doorway. “Yeah?”

“Have you seen Sora’s box?”

“No.” Tatsuki frowned in a way that reminded Renji of Nanao. “I thought you had moved it. Because, you know, who keeps a music box in a bathroom?”

“It is shaped like a toothbrush,” Orihime defended her view of the order of things, but a touch of panic was creeping in her voice. “Are you sure?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Do you think someone could have taken it? It was Sora’s!”

“Nah, no one’s been here for ages, except for Ichigo and the repair guy. Maybe Ichigo moved it for some reason.”

Renji listened, both curious and worried. Ichigo or the repair guy, he was certain Orihime wouldn’t see Sora’s music box again, no matter whoever Sora had been to her.

Should he warn the girls, or would it be better if they didn’t know too much?

“Too bad,” he tested the waters. “I take it that it had some sentimental value?”

“It was her brother’s,” Tatsuki said, looking angrier than Nanao ever did. “He passed away years ago and that thing is pretty much all he left her.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Renji said and decided it wasn’t a good time to say anything that sounded too crazy. He’d speak to Orihime when he got a chance. “I hope you find it. Thanks for trying to help, though.”

“We didn’t even offer you anything to eat,” Orihime fussed.

Tatsuki’s frown deepened further. She seemed more interested in getting Renji out than finding the music box. Maybe she had taken it?

“Don’t worry about it, I should be offering you something for your troubles,” Renji said, and tried to find a natural way to ask about Ichigo. “But if you don’t mind, I could drink a bit of water.”

“I’ll get it,” Tatsuki said quickly. “The kitchen is this way.” 

In the small but clean and practical kitchen Tatsuki took a pint and filled it from the tap. The pint was made of glass, free from scratches and the handle was, of course, intact

The thing probably had never held beer. Somehow the thought made Renji feel sad and guilty. The miscellaneous set of pints he had at home was the loot that he, Shuhei and sometimes Kira had lifted from bars, back when their clumsy fake ID’s had occasionally fooled the gorillas well enough to get the trio in.

It was almost unbelievable, the way everything was fucked-up right now. He didn’t even know if he was sorry because he was no longer a teenager slipping glassware into his jacket, or because, deep down, he wanted a pretty girl to live with, some nice things and a dog called Spot.

He downed the water and let Tatsuki fill the pint again.

“Thanks,” he said, and heard Orihime moving things around in the bathroom. He drank the water and put the pint in the kitchen sink. “I hope she finds it.”

“Could it be that you might have something to do with it being lost in the first place?”

“Why would it?”

“You are pretty damn interested in some stupid music box, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“I told you, I knew the melody. Besides, why would I be asking around if I had taken it?”

“I can think of a few reasons.”

“Like what?”

“For starters, I know she’s a pretty young lady. Don’t you think I don’t know what men want from pretty young ladies? You must be twenty years older than her, yuck!”

The exchange was getting heated, and Renji was just about to sharply correct Tatsuki’s estimate on his age when he realized she was baiting him. Taking the bait was probably in the top ten of stupid things he could do.

“Well, FYI, it’s nothing like that.” 

“Good for you, because I’m seriously considering calling the cops. I saw you today, when you waited for her, and in the middle of night just like a day ago.”

“I just walked past the house.”

“Yeah, after you stood there and stared, god knows how long. Stop kidding me.”

“I was thinking of the melody!”

“Explain that to the cops when they throw your ass in jail.”

Renji huffed. “What the fuck do you want me to do?”

“Stay away from Orihime and me. If you have the music box, which, by the way, I plan to report as stolen if it isn’t found and soon, give it to me. Not to her.”

“Report all you want, I don’t have it. But fine, have it your way.”

“Fine. Have a good walk home.”

Renji didn’t dare to provoke her any more than necessary. He said a quick goodbye to Orihime and left home, thinking ugly things of Tatsuki. He didn’t need cops sniffing around, for obvious reasons, and suspected that Honda didn’t like him much as it was. Being reported as a stalker wouldn’t help his case one bit.

Fuck that girl and that attitude of hers.

Water was sloshing uncomfortably in his stomach. It made him nauseous, and the sun felt especially hot and sharp. The hottest hours of the day should have gone by, but it certainly didn’t feel like it.

He slowed down, and had to sit down after a while. His head ached, he was getting increasingly dizzy, and the cigarette he tried to smoke tasted like ass again.

A woman with a dog walked past. The dog barked and the woman told it to be quiet, but she slowed down and stared for a while. Renji gave him the finger, and woman picked the pace again.

He regretted the gesture almost immediately, when it occurred to him the it actually might be good if someone asked if he was ok. He could say no. Maybe that someone would call an ambulance, like in the mainland. They could do a drug screen in the hospital and find out what Tatsuki had put in the water.

Yeah, the water.

He stuck his fingers down his throat and kept trying and gagging until he could feel tears running on his face, but nothing came up.

It wasn’t a surprise. He had never learned how to make himself vomit. One of the girls in the childrens’ home had said it was a good thing, because if he couldn’t puke on will, he couldn’t get bulimia. Renji remembered thinking that if the main thing stopping him from developing any eating disorder was lack of skill, he’d start to worry.

A couple years after that discussion he had attended her funeral. The rumor was she had been pregnant, tried to abort with a knitting needle and died of blood loss. It didn’t ring true, but Renji couldn’t tell for real. Desperate people did desperate things, and unlike her, he had already moved out at that point.

Whether it was the memory or his fingers that did the trick, but Renji spat something slimy and foamy on the ground. It tasted like bile and his throat hurt, so he supposed there was no point of continuing what he was doing. After wiping his hand on his clothes, he started the walk home.

When finally there, he took a long shower and seriously thought of calling someone, but the shower and fresh water made his head feel clearer. He settled for lying down and watching tv, although later on he didn’t even remember what was on.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tuesday already? Time really flies.

Renji woke up, still in his daytime clothes. He was laying on his sofa, and the tv was still on, but it had gone to power saving mode. The lights were off. Even the sun wasn’t up yet, although more than a touch of morning glow promised it wouldn’t take too long before a new, baking hot day was officially on. The phone’s clock showed 04:41.

Renji didn’t feel tired, per se, but groggy and achy. He scratched his head and was immediately disgusted by the layer of sweat and grease that now covered his hand. 

The baby next door was crying his tiny lungs out. Or hers. Renji hadn’t even seen the child, much less pried on its gender. And damn, the walls really were like paper. If this baby was a fussy one, Renji would end up as sleep-deprived as the new parents.

He had slept on the cigarette box. His thigh had a sore spot thanks to that, and the box was crumpled. The cigarettes inside had seen better days, too, but Renji lit one, fully knowing it was against the landlord’s rules.

The cigarette was gone before the baby calmed down. Renji stubbed it out on a dirty plate, took a minute to stare at a dead fly on the floor and collect his strength to get moving.

He drank water and brewed coffee. The gurgling of the coffee maker was loud in the early morning silence, and the water had the same nasty taste as the risotto. So, it hadn’t been the fridge that kept stinking up his food. It must be the kitchenware.

The coffee maker’s drip lock was broken. When Renji poured the coffee, a few drops fell on the hot plate. It sizzled and gave out a bitter stench of burnt coffee.

The coffee tasted bad, but Renji downed it with one gulp, burning his mouth in the process.

His headache eased during the shower, and he used hand soap for his hair. Getting clean, shaving and dressing in clean clothes made him feel like a human again. He even considered cleaning the apartment too, but it was too early to start. The rules forbid anything noisy until 7 am. 

Around six o’clock Renji decided to head for the school. The library wouldn’t open until eight, but the cafeteria started to serve breakfast earlier.

Turned out that the day’s breakfast was semolina porridge with apple jam. Renji didn’t especially like the porridge, or the sour jam the cafeteria always served with it, but it was a lot better than anything in his own house, and he was pretty hungry. 

So, he cleaned his plate like a good boy and read the daily newspaper while waiting for the library to open.

He was the only one at present, save the tired-looking librarian. A thermos bottle peeked from the librarian’s backpack. Eating and drinking on the library was forbidden, but the librarian was clearly about to break the rule.

Renji pitied the librarian, found the books he expected to be using and took them to the most distant corner he could find. Maybe the poor man dared to drink the coffee when no one was in sight. Or maybe he was a tea person, Renji didn’t know, and didn’t care that much.

Exergy wasn’t a too-difficult concept to get a hold on, and Nanao had done good work with the literature part. Renij’s role was mostly to prepare an experimental plan and send it to Nanao.

When lunch time was closing in, Renji was already writing a polite e-mail and fine-tuning the phrasing of his work.

Phrasing was pretty damn important. Hand in something poorly phrased, and you’ll find you just promised to end world hunger and cure cancer within two weeks’ time.

He finished with a click that send the e-mail and the plan to Nanao, and he was a free man.

Renji signed out and left the computer to the next student. All the computers were already taken; it was the busiest hours in the library.

He spotted Momo, who was sitting some distance away from him, and apparently reading something. 

The something was a mathematics handbook, Renji noticed as he walked closer. Momo didn’t seem to be noticing much of anything except the book, so he sneaked behind her to startle her.

Just as he did so, it occurred to him that Momo was probably still more than a bit spooked by Gin’s death.

“Hi, Momo,” he greeted her instead, but she still jumped.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Momo gave him a smile. “Oh, I was just reading. Nice to see you at school.”

“You make it sound like I was Rangiku, or something,” Renji said and grinned.

“Did you hear she found a job? In that suitcase and handbag shop place she always liked?” Momo changed the topic.

Renji nodded. “She mentioned it, we’ve been exchanging e-mails. But I didn’t realize she knew the place beforehand. Good thing, though.”

“It is. We, me and Izuru, that is, thought we should celebrate it. Like when we were kids. No alcohol or bars, but a good movie, some ice cream cake, and candy. A colorful paper hat, if you want one.”

“Celebrate Rangiku without Rangiku, and without beer?” Renji laughed a little, and didn’t mention that he or Izuru hadn’t had many parties like that as children. Momo seemed sincerely excited and happy, and he didn’t want to spoil it. “None of that does even makes any sense.”

“Does it have to? Would you like to come?”

“When and where?” 

“That’s great!” Momo’s smile widened. “Our place, today or tomorrow, either one is good for us. Shuhei said he can’t be there, so it would be the three of us. I mean, if you don’t want to bring a date, that is.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Momo’s smile slightly faded. “The two of you aren’t fighting, are you?”

It was an excellent opportunity to get rid of the imaginary girlfriend, but Renji still didn’t have a heart to break Momo’s good mood. “Eh, no. Just that she’s not in here and has to tie things up with her ex.”

“I hope it’ll sort itself out soon.”  
  
“Me, too.” Renji said. He just had to make sure it wouldn’t. “But I’m free to come. Today’s perfect for me.”

“Six o’clock?”

“’kay. See you later, alligator?”

Momo giggled. “After a while, crocodile.”

* * *

When it was getting close to six, Renji didn’t feel like going anywhere. His interest in any party was around zero and quickly falling toward the negative range.

Nanao had answered his e-mail, torn the experiment plan to shreds and replaced it with her own. It was a lot better one, Renji admitted. That was the worst part of it, and the comments didn’t help much. The feedback burger Nanao had served him was totally missing the bun, the beef was way too spicy and the dressing bitter.

Plus, eating the more literal ice cream cake with Momo and Izuru didn’t help him with finding Rukia, and it had turned out he couldn’t even contact Ichigo again.

Even the reason for the celebration was kind of depressing, if you stopped to think about it. Sure, it was good Rangiku had found a job, but keeping in mind why she was trying to find one in the first place…

Renji was seriously considering calling Momo and excusing himself when a police car drove past his building. Police cars were rarely seen in the School Island – Renji wasn’t sure if there normally even was one – and he had a nasty feeling the car was there partially for him. Damn that Tatsuki.

Soon after he left the apartment.

The building Momo and Izuru lived in was approximately as old as the one he lived in. It was of the same general style of concrete elements and had undergone the same improvements. Despite that, Momo’s and Izuru’s apartment was a lot nicer than Renji’s. 

It was cleaner, for starters, especially since Renji hadn’t done much cleaning recently. The furniture was new and of a similar style, thanks to monetary help from Momo’s mother and stepfather. The tableware was an actual set, complete with non-chipped coffee cups, and the main table was used for eating instead as a flat storage place for random stuff. There were potted plants on windowsills, and decorative pillows on the sofa.

Renji had always had difficulties with placing Izuru in this environment, but somehow Izuru placed himself in in seamlessly. He sat at the table with a cup of tea and cookies; on the sofa, holding a decorative pillow with a kitten pattern; next to the writing desk, checking his e-mail while sipping vanilla tea.

This time Izuru was sitting on the sofa with a book. Judging on the title and the cover, the book was girly. Renji guessed Izuru had been reading it to Momo. The main table was already set, minus the ice cream cake. On each plate was an obviously hand-made paper hat. 

“Hi,” Renji greeted. “What’s the movie of choice today?”

Izuru put the book away. “Momo thought we’d watch the first Harry Potter, but if you’ve seen it too many times, we can watch something else.”

Renji had seen the movie maybe twice. His inner critic gave it two and a half stars, but he nodded. “Sounds good.”

“Do you want real food before we start?” Momo asked. “We had soup earlier, I can heat some some of it up.”

Renji, who hadn’t eaten since school lunch, was happy to say yes. He was hungry, and Momo was a good cook.

When they were done with soup, ice cream cake and paper hats and got to the movie, Renji fell asleep before Harry was in Hogwarts. 

* * *

Renji spent most of Tuesday in Momo’s and Izuru’s apartment. Both had lectures and neither was at home for hours, but Renji didn’t miss the company. He just didn’t want to go home. Part of it had a lot to do with the police car, but another part was that he just didn’t want to be home. 

He spent a lot time thinking, letting his mind wander where it wanted to go. He thought about exergy and Nanao, and the mystery of stinking kitchenware, but mostly Rukia and his childhood.

It was starting to occur to him he had recently been remembering the bad parts, the deaths and drugs and underage drinking and all the losses he had suffered, and it wasn’t like him.

The bad parts were there, but mixed with the good parts. The times when he had managed to be a decent human being. Usually it was the good parts he thought about, like the fun he had had when going to swim with Shuhei and Izuru. The day at the beach when he made a young mother happy by finding and returning her car keys. 

The months he had dated a Christian girl who wanted to marry him the day he turned 18, and their shared first real kiss. When he had realized he was fairly smart, and that the half-hearted effort he made at high school was about to get him into the university of his choice. 

He knew the good stuff was still there. He remembered remembering it, but he didn’t remember, if that made any sense.

Later that evening, he left to go home. He didn’t think Izuru or Momo would kick him out, but he didn’t want to overstay his welcome, nor act strange. Besides, he had things to do in his apartment. The mess waiting for him wasn’t about to clean itself.

Turned out staying home wasn’t even slightly nicer than hanging out Izuru’s and Momo’s.

A cop car drove past his building. He switched off the lights. Maybe it was clear from the car that they knew he was at home, but the cops didn’t have to know that he was doing. Not that he had anything to hide at the moment, as he was back to watching videos of cats and occasional ferrets.

It was hardly 10 pm when he felt sleepy, and fell asleep soundly till about half past one.

At first, he didn’t even realize what woke him, but it was his phone. Shuhei was calling.

“Yeah,” he answered the phone, still sleepy.

“Yo, how’s it going?”

“I was asleep. Are you drunk or something?”

“Not any more… that’s why I’m calling, sorry. Quite a lot of lizards in here.”

“Aha?” Renji said, still more asleep then awake.

“And I’m not speaking of some geckos, it’s T-rex and velociraptors of Jurassic Park, or worse.” Shuhei’s said, and his voice grew darker. “Would you mind if I asked you to come here?”

“Like, now?”

“Yeah. The lizards are afraid of company.”

Renji wasn’t familiar with that kind of lizards, and he didn’t feel much like waking up properly and walking to Shuhei’s, but he agreed to come anyway.

If nothing else, it would give the cops keeping an eye of him something to think about.

He walked past Orihime’s and Tatsuki’s building, although it was a pointless detour. As he had promised to Tatsuki, he didn’t even look at the house.

Shuhei was waiting him outside the building. The stairwell he sat in was lit with fluorescent tubes, and the light didn’t do any favors to his face. He looked pale, tired and spooked.

“Hi”, he half-said, half-whispered, and stood up to let Renji in.

Renji just nodded. “You’ve finally got the spare mattress?”

“Sorry, no. You can have the bed if you want to.”

“I can sleep on the couch. Are you going to work tomorrow?”

“Sadly, yeah.”

Shuhei didn’t look much better in the kinder light of his apartment. The next day would be hell for him, Renji thought, but refrained from criticizing. He never criticized Shuhei’s choices. 

“Is it ok if we watched something?” he asked instead. “A documentary, or something?”

Shuhei nodded. “There’s a one on plants. What did you watch with Izuru?”

“Harry Potter. I fell asleep in a second… Momo said you couldn’t come.”

“Yeah, Tousen asked if I’d show him around. I said I would. Shouldn’t have done that, I was super hungover the whole day.”

Renji gave a small laugh and switched the tv on. Shuhei found the documentary on his computer.

The documentary was probably the most boring one Renji had ever watched. It was about plants and their life cycles. A significant amount of time was spent watching how the plants grew. The film was sped up, but that didn’t make it much more interesting.

Boredom and the even, pleasant voice of the narrator made Renji feel sleepy. Shuhei dozed against him, wrapped in a thin sheet and startling awake every now and then. Renji, too, startled fully awake every time he did.

There was something nightmarish in the moments Renji actually slept. His dreams were fragments of actual nightmares, snippets of machine guns firing and blood, dirty white rags stained with red.

The difference between dream and waking world started to blur, and Renji thought groggily that Shuhei’s lizards didn’t fear company but liked it instead, and half on them were now on his shoulders. 

He had to do something to keep sleep away.

Shuhei startled awake again.

Renji paused the documentary. “Dou you remember when we were kids?”

Shuhei rubbed his face. “What about it?”

“I was just thinking. What’s the first thing that pops into your mind?”

“I don’t know. It was a childhood, normal for us.”

“Just think a while.”

Shuhei didn’t have to think for a long time. “We always had soup on Wednesdays.”

“Seriously? You remember that Wednesday was soup day?”

Shuhei rubbed his face again. “But it was. You asked the first thing that popped into mind. It happened to be the soup day. You can’t do better yourself.”

“I can.”

“No, you can’t”

“Rukia.”

Shuhei was still and didn’t say anything. Renji wasn’t sure any longer if he had actually said it, or just thought about saying it.

“Rukia,” he repeated.

“That’s not a pleasant thing to keep remembering,” Shuhei said and rubbed his face for third time. He was wiping his eyes, Renji realized.

“No, it’s not,” Renji admitted. “I’ve just been thinking about her.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been wondering why she was declared dead so soon after. I read that usually they wait for years.”

Shuhei shut his eyes. Renji wondered whether he was trying not to cry openly, or avoiding looking him in the eye.

“That’s not always applied.”

“I read about that, too. But there wasn’t any reason to think she was actually dead, was there? She just disappeared.”

“You just don’t remember.”

“Remember what?” 

“Can we talk about this in a few days?”

Renji felt heart was pounding. “Do you actually know something about it?”

Shuhei nodded. The gesture was small, pained. “You probably don’t remember, you were so small and even we kids understood something was not right with you, but can this please wait? Like, two days, tops?”

Renji didn’t know why he started to laugh. The situation certainly wasn’t amusing for him, but he laughed like he hadn’t laughed for months, if not years. Every time he thought he was calming down and tried to talk, a new bout of laugher took over him.

Rukia, the girl who had died but who lived. Like Harry Potter, but not at all like Harry Potter.

That thought finally cleared his head. The hysterics died, and he noticed Shuhei was staring at him. The pale face and dark circles around his eyes made him look something that Renji would have expected to see in a zombie movie set.

He almost wanted to say it could wait for a couple days.

Almost.

“Sorry, Shu, but I think I have the right to know.”

“I’m not saying you don’t.”

“I mean, now.”

Shuhei gave up. “Do you remember the beach close by? If you’d call that a beach, it was probably more pine needles than sand.”

“Of course.”

“Do you remember how we got there?”

Renji tried to remember the path. He could recall details, like how he walked down a steep rocky cliff, and how far down the waves broke on the rocks

With the memory came an inkling about what Shuhei would say next. Renji could feel the lump in his throat getting bigger and making it more difficult to breathe, but he nodded nevertheless.

“A day after she was gone, they apparently started to think it was a crime. They took us to the beach to play while the police went through the house. It was late fall already; cold weather and the wind was from the sea. You always wanted to go to the cliff to look at the waves. You remember that?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, with no one physically stopping you, you went to peek down. Like a second later, you were tugging my sleeve and holding her plush toy, the worn-out rabbit, if that’s ringing more bells for you. It was all bloody, and we took it to the Miss Shio. She started to cry and actually puked out of shock when she realized what it was. They called the cops, who got there and found that blood was spilled the rocks below. The investigation apparently decided that the man most likely threw her down and the tide took the body to the sea.”

“What man?”

“You don’t remember that either?”

A touch of anger made it through the fear Renji was feeling. Shuhei was spouting out the facts like they were recollections of a movie. He was without emotion, like none of it was real. It didn’t feel real for Renji either. He still couldn’t remember ever even holding the plush rabbit.

His earphones were at home, not available for him.

Understanding the silence, Shuhei continued: “Before she disappeared, there was a young man just hanging around. We saw him every now and then, too, no one just paid any attention to him at the time. He was a suspect, but as far as I know, no one ever found out who he was.”

Earphones or no earphones, Renji had to give it a try.

“What did he look like?”

Shuhei’s thoughts were not pleasant thoughts to think. They were images of a young dark-haired man who stared at the children with his grey joyless eyes, mixed with images of a boy holding a blood-stained toy rabbit. There was a sound of a house sparrow chirping on a nearby gravestone. flowers placed on seamen’s memorial, and the coldness on his fingers despite the thick mittens.

Newer memories mingled seamlessly with the old ones, forcing themselves to the front. How anise liqueur burned all the way down, and how he kept waking up in strange places without knowing how he had got there. The way he was ashamed afterwards, the sentences that were missing an ending or beginning or everything but ending and beginning, and images of a folding knife with the blade locked on and off its place in a hand of a dark-skinned man.

“He was ordinary,” Shuhei answered with the same lack of emotions he had used before. 

Renji didn’t ask again. He knew already that Shuhei had referred to the man with the Rubik’s cube. The man was older now than in Shuhei’s mind, of course, but it couldn’t be anyone else. So, it really was the consultant, he was the one who had killed Rukia.

Except that Rukia wasn’t dead, and nothing was making any sense. 

Even if Renji had wanted to keep asking, he was no longer sure he could have. The lump in his throat was making it more and more difficult to breath. He put his head down on his knees, but it didn’t stop the world going wrong in his eyes.

“Are you ok?” he heard Shuhei ask, and he answered by shaking his head.

“Here we go again, then. Do you want me to call some help?”

Renji shook his head again. There was no point to calling, and perhaps make his life even more miserable than it already was.

He heard Shuhei switching the documentary back on, and felt him pulling the sheet around them both. The time was about 6 am, and on tv, David Attenborough explained that in one hour a maple three could pump as much as 450 liters of water into its foliage.


	13. Chapter 13

Renji woke up when he heard Shuhei moving around the room. He felt too tired to even open his eyes.

The next time he knew anything of the world was when Shuhei poked his face with a tablespoon. He didn’t feel any more refreshed than the last time, but opened his eyes. 

Two Shuheis, one solid and one ghostly. He was so fucking tired he was seeing things in double.

“I’ve gotta go to work,” Shuhei informed him. “Are you going to be ok? I left the coffeemaker on.”

“Mm, yah.” That came out as a mumble. The brain was catching up with the importance of seeing normally, but he was still way too tired to articulate properly.

The sound of the apartment door closing signaled Shuhei was off to work. Renji lifted his feet onto the sofa and was able to nap for an hour, maybe one and a half, but his head was pounding, he was thirsty and wanted to smoke.

Had he been at home, he would have lit up inside. Now he had to actually drag his ass to the balcony.

Shuhei was lucky to have a balcony, Renji thought. He felt much too horrible to enjoy the breeze, but it was early enough that at least the sun wasn’t shining on his side of the building. It was almost cool on the balcony.

After finishing his first cigarette, Renji lit another and got himself a cup of coffee. It wasn’t fresh any longer, but it was free from the taste of his kitchenware. That alone was enough to make it pleasant despite Shuhei still not having any milk, and the contents of his sugar bowl having gone hard enough to bludgeon someone with.

Renji in the shade, the coffee cup in one hand and the cigarette in the other, rested his head against the concrete wall. The wasps Shuhei had talked earlier seemed to be hard at work, flying in and out of their nest. The bastards had honey, unlike himself.

Not to say he liked his coffee with honey, he thought, and while he was at it, wasps didn’t make honey. The larvae were into protein, like eating other bugs, and the adults were interested in sweet things like nectar.

He wanted his coffee with bug protein even less than he wanted it with honey.

No longer feeling envious of the wasps, he spent a while smoking, drinking coffee and watching the nest. His mind was blessedly free from any thoughts, good or bad. It was like his thinking brain had given up on the monstrous task it was expected to tackle.

Some of the wasps became interested in him and came to investigate. One of them sat on the rim of his coffee cup and walked around the edge for a while. Renji watched the wasp take a few steps, pause and feel the coffee cup, then take more steps and stop again.

Apparently, it found the cup’s protein and nectar content quite low, got bored and took off.

Slow but steady, Renji’s thinking brain got a grip on itself, rolled up its sleeves and went for the toolbox. His mind started to focus on the previous night – not what had happened to him, and certainly not that Shuhei had witnessed it. He was thinking what he had learned, instead.

The police, the crime scene investigation, the guys who used science to figure these things out, had thought Rukia was dead.

Had he seen a spirit, a thing from beyond, or maybe, after all of this, had he just imagined her in the locker room?

No, that was some sticky horseshit. There was no such thing as ghosts, and the still-healing scar on his chest certainly wasn’t a product of his imagination.

Better to ask why the consultant had framed Rukia’s death, and why he had abducted her in the first place.

None of the possibilities he could think up were pleasant. All those years…

He had to find the consultant, period. He just didn’t know how.

Renji ran out of coffee. There were no answers for him at the bottom of the cup, just like Shuhei hadn’t found any on the bottom of the anise liqueur bottles. 

Not feeling like being at home or going out, aside from the balcony, Renji decided to stay at Shuhei’s and make himself a bit more presentable.

His clothes smelled stale and bitter, somehow worse than just sweat. It had to be the smell of fear, he thought while rummaging through Shuhei’s wardrobe. The two of them were close enough in size to share some clothes, and evidently Shuhei had found time to do laundry at some point of his bender.

Renji found a pair of cargo shorts and a t-shirt in an unfolded but clean pile of clothes on Shuhei’s bed, took them and headed to shower. The weather was way too hot to give a damn about socks or underpants, and besides, it was all in the realm of possibility that Shuhei wouldn’t be too happy to know Renji was wearing his boxers.

Whether he’d be happy about Renji wearing his shorts without the boxers, well, poor old Shu just had to learn how to deal with some things.

The fridge was empty, except for a tiny piece of moldy cheese, a bottle of ketchup and a carton of iced tea, which was a couple months past its expiration date. In the vegetable and fruit drawers Renji found a couple bananas covered with blue mold. It was the same species that spotted the cheese, judging by the color.

Shuhei always kept a small amount of cash in his desk’s uppermost drawer. Renji found it and used it to order three pizzas, as he hadn’t bought any money with him.

When Shuhei returned, Renji was smoking on the balcony again. Shuhei joined him, nodded a wordless hello and took the offered cigarette. Renji provided the light, as Shuhei didn’t normally smoke. No point in turning your lungs black, he said, the cancer sticks will only give you a bad breath and an addiction.

Renji informed Shuhei that he had taken the clothes and money. Shuhei was only happy to have food. They ate rest of the pizza, and spent rest of the day watching the plant documentary.

* * *

On Thursday, Renji left for school from Shuhei’s place. He was wearing the loaned clothes and had some borrowed money to buy food. 

He didn’t want to go anywhere, but Nanao had called, telling him that as he hadn’t answered her e-mails, she had booked a time to present their experimental plan to the teaching assistant. No one was allowed to skip that. If you couldn’t come, you got one more chance, and if you missed that without a compelling reason, well, better luck next year.

Renji had a difficult time imagining places he wanted to be less than in a small room with Nanao, especially as the damned plan was still sketchy in his mind.

But it was important to keep up the appearances.

The meeting went just as badly as Renji had expected. Nanao did most work with presenting, but as usual, the assistant asked questions of the quieter person. Renji would have been able to answer most of them on a good day, but this didn’t happen to be one on those. Focusing the task at hand was hard, and his thoughts kept wandering to Rukia and the consultant.

He was almost surprised when the assistant ok’d their plan and allowed them to book a time. Nanao was surprised, too.

What didn’t come as a surprise to Renji was that Nanao didn’t hold her tongue about the situation. The words hurt a bit, although Renji knew he deserved them.

“It didn’t go too well,” he admitted. “I’ve been thinking about a lot of stuff lately.”

Nanao gave a small, understanding nod. “Are you going to help Rangiku?”

“Sorry?”

“She’s moving.”

“Oh. Can you elaborate on that?”

Nanao rolled her eyes rather theatrically. “Rangiku is moving out of her current apartment and back home to her family. I was under the impression you were friends, and I’m fairly sure your name was on the e-mail.”

Renji scratched his head. “Yeah, I know her… I didn’t check my e-mail today. When’s the move? I knew she left, but not that she’s going to give up the apartment.”

“There’s no point in paying rent for months if you don’t even live in the place,” Nanao pointed out. “The e-mail said she’s moving today, whatever time people can come.”

“’kay. I’ll grab some food and head to her place. Are you coming?”

“Unlikely. Is it ok with you if we schedule the experiments for tomorrow?”

“Uh, could it wait for a little longer?” 

Nanao wanted to get the experiment done as soon as possible. Not wanting to hinder her academic performance in every possible corner, Renji gave in. He would have time to look through the plan later that evening.

The lunch was spaghetti Bolognese. The food was tasty, and eating made him feel a lot better, both physically and mentally. Thinking things through and focusing on stuff was easier.

He had never been to Rangiku’s, but the e-mail Nanao had spoken of had the address, and Renji found the place without any difficulty. The main door was locked, but Rangiku was at home and let him in. 

Most of the students were at school and the corridor was quiet. So was Rangiku’s apartment. Renji was the first one there, aside from Rangiku herself.

“Hi,” he greeted, “Nanao said you needed help with the move.”

“Yeah. I don’t really want to give the place up, but the rent is too high to keep the place empty… Are you ok? You look – sorry – bad, somehow.”

“Gee, thanks.” Renji attempted humor, but his tone was half-assed. He kind of wanted to say that Rangiku didn’t look too good herself – the weeks past had been taxing and had brought the first signs of aging, plain for everyone to see.

“It’s not my business anyway,” she answered. Her tone reminded Renji of a robot at first. It got a lot livelier soon after, though. “Thanks for coming. I don’t think there will be that many people to help. I got the van kind of unexpectedly, and everyone has their own schedules… Not to say that they’d be coming even if they knew a year in advance.”

“Just tell me how I can be of help.”

“I think we should wait a bit to see if someone else’s coming. Do you want coffee?”

“Might do good. Thanks.”

Rangiku poured the grounds, measured the water and switched the coffeemaker on. Meanwhile, Renji viewed the apartment, initially trying to assess how much stuff weighed, but soon noticing other things. Like how the place was clean, but otherwise it looked like there had been zero effort to pack so much as a one single sock.

Rangiku had left in hurry and come back only to move. She had a day’s worth of time to pack her whole life into banana boxes and drive away.

Rrenji couldn’t deny the he was tempted to follow the suit. “How’s it going at home? Good?”

“About as good as you can imagine when the only child is dead.”

Renji didn’t have much to say about that. Rangiku was quiet as well. A lonely fan whirred on the kitchen table, and the coffeemaker gurgled next to the sink. 

A mail order catalogue rested on the table. Just to have something to do with his hands, Renji picked it up and started to flip through it, not caring that the company sold only women’s underwear. 

“Anything worth buying?” Rangiku asked after a while, a touch of amusement in her voice. It reminded Renji of how things had been before Gin’s death. When he looked up, he saw her smile.

“Nah, the pink lacy strings are kind of pretty, but I think have as many pairs as I need.”

The coffee was done. Rangiku took two mugs, milk and sugar on the table and poured for herself, then Renji.

“Has anyone said they’ll come?” Renji asked.

“No one promised, but I’ve got a few ‘I’ll come if I’ll have time’ answers… Do you want to help me pack after the coffee?”

“Sure. How about we go out to drink? I’m craving a smoke.”

Rangiku didn’t mind going out, and the two of them walked to the official smoking place. Renji smoked and drank his coffee in silence, Rangiku settled for the coffee. 

When the cigarette was finished, she kissed him, and he kissed her back.

“You taste like coffee and cigarettes,” Rangiku whispered.

“Well, duh.” Renji said without laughing aloud, but felt the corners of his mouth turn up.

“Who are you kissing?”

“Who are you?”

“Who am I what?” Rangiku asked in obvious confusion, but shrugged it off. “I didn’t say anything. Come, let’s go back in… I’ll show you some pink lacy strings.”

This time around, telling her no didn’t even occur to Renji. Rangiku showed him what was promised, and a lot more.

Afterwards he just wanted to take a nice cool shower, but was too polite to tell her to stop cuddling.

> * * *

Waking up from Rangiku’s bed was not a pleasant experience for Renji. He was naked and felt sweaty and sticky.

The situation was not improved by the buzzer being what had woken him up.

Swearing aloud Renji sat up and started to sort through his clothes. 

Which were, if you wanted to get technical, Shuhei’s clothes. Renji wondered briefly if Shuhei would be amused or mildly disgusted by his unwashed after-sex dick rubbing against the cargo shorts.

Rangiku seemed significantly less busy. She stood up almost lazily and pressed the buzzer while still naked. Somehow, she managed to be fully clothed and already at the apartment door before the apartment’s doorbell rang.

When she opened the door, Renji swore only in his mind, but quite colorfully.

It was Momo.

The apartment smelled like sex, he was sure of it.

“Hi,” Momo greeted, “I thought I’d come and help with the move. I have to go back to school soon but I have a couple hours to spare… What are you doing in here?”

The last part was obviously meant for Renji, who understood the real question perfectly well. But the only accountability he owed was to Honda the Imaginary Girlfriend, who was imaginary and therefore didn’t mind.

“I came to help with the move,” he responded and hoped he was able to summon the tone that told Momo to keep the peace.

She did keep the peace, but her _hmph_ was the one she sometimes used when she was unhappy with Izuru. Renji knew she wasn’t done with the topic, but willing to postpone the discussion till a more private time.

“Is anyone else coming?” she changed the topic, speaking to Rangiku.

“If they have time, but tbh, I don’t think so. Do you want to help with packing?”

Momo agreed, and the girls started to sort through clothes, shoes and things like that. Renji was tasked with the bookshelf.

It was an easy job, in the sense the shelf actually held books instead of fragile pink porcelain that needed to be wrapped gently in a gazillion layers of protective plastic. Renji only had to place the books in the banana boxes without making the boxes too heavy. Stephen Hawking, Ishikawa and Dostoevsky went into the same box with Calculus and Organic Chemistry, and would stay there till further notice.

The books would really cramp Rangiku’s style, Renji thought, if they were common knowledge. 

Then again, she was in the uni. One didn’t get in by the merit of beautiful blond hair, a perfect tan and boobs massive enough to have their own gravitational field. And despite her lack of attendance, she had likely passed all the necessary courses. She was probably much smarter than Renji had given her credit for. 

The monotony of moving books was broken by a post card falling down from between the pages of a one of the books, titled 500 Freshwater Aquarium Fish. Its picture side was down, but there was an old-looking stamp at the top right corner. A closer look showed the card was addressed to Inga Nyman, who apparently lived, or had done so, in Stockholm, wherever the fuck that was. The sender was Peter Nyman, and the card was sent from Sollebrunn.

None of these hold Renji’s interest, but his heart leaped when she saw Sollebrunn’s postal code.

46692\. The serial number of his earphones.

Renji picked up the card, but dropped it immediately. When he as much as touched the card with his fingertips, his whole body felt like he was standing too close to a big fire. 

He didn’t have much time to think. Rangiku and Momo were discussing a beige coat that (according to Momo) looked good but (in Rangiku’s opinion) took too much storage space.

Neither of them would notice.

Renji slipped the card into his pocket. Even when he wasn’t directly touching it, he could feel the heat it radiated, and when he took a quick peek into the book, he saw a familiar name. The book was a gift from Gin.

* * *

It was getting dark when the water taxi, a mini ferry from the mainland, arrived. Renji hung with Rangiku until it was time to drive the van onto the ferry.

“See you next year,” Rangiku said when Renji hopped out. He hadn’t even known she had a driver’s license. 

“Yeah. I hope the job’s going to go fine.”

There was a brief but uncomfortable silence. Renji was feverishly trying and failing to utilize his last chance to warn her about the card and the items and explain what was going on. She seemed to struggle with words as well, and settled on a small laugh so obviously fake it was ridiculous.

Renji faked a smile that felt as artificial as her laugh sounded. He slammed the van’s door shut, and Rangiku drove the van onto the mini ferry. He felt pretty tired but smoked a cigarette and stayed to watch as the mini ferry first departed, then slowly changed into a dot of light against the dark sea.

For fuck’s sake, it shouldn’t have been so difficult to speak up.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t had the time to do so, or privacy. Momo had helped two hours or so before going back to school, and no one else had bothered to show up. The two of them had hauled every single huge ass box and piece of furniture made of lead-fucking-bricks into the van, and wow did his muscles know it.

The post card from Sollebrunn felt like it was doing its best to burn a hole on his shorts. Shuhei’s shorts. Whatever.

Or maybe it was his leg the damn thing was after.

Ignoring the sensation of burning as best as he could, Renji took the card out of his pocket and gave it a proper look. Unsurprisingly, postal code of Sollebrunn and names of Inga and Peter Nyman were unchanged. So was the gray fish picture on the stamp, worth of two Swedish crowns. The card was dated to summer 1985, which was all Renji understood of the short message penned in beautiful handwriting.

The image on the other side was a black and white picture of a wooden building. A railway station, most likely, given the rails next to it. The black, simple letters above the door said Sjövik. 

The burning sensation was getting to be too much. Renji put the card back in his pocket.

To his surprise, the kiosk hadn’t closed yet and he was able to buy chips, Fanta and smokes. 

When the cashier handed him the change, a police car drove past the docks slowly, like the cops were trying to find something.

Renji watched the car to disappear amongst the blue houses and their gardens. He didn’t stay to see if it would circle back.

The first thing he did when he got home was to put the card in the safest place he could fathom, which was the bottom layer of the miscellaneous box of electronics. Then he threw all his clothes in the laundry bin and took a shower long enough to wash away any sin. The water tasted like iron, but getting clean made him feel almost human, and the warm water eased the ache in his muscles.

His body and brain cried for sleep, but he ignored them and sat at the computer. The chips and Fanta were his dinner while he googled the numbers.

It was disappointing. The series could be found in quite a few places, including online store product numbers and postal codes in more than one country.

None of it seemed to have anything to do with the items.

He had to give up. One didn’t just find his way to secrets by googling a postal code, he decided, even if the series held more meaning than just that one. The world different from the one he lived in was going to keep its secrets. For now.

Renji was already lying on his bed when he got a new idea he had to test right away. 

He dug his way through the box of miscellaneous electronics, took the card out and placed the earphones on it.

After a whole lot of nothing happened, he placed the card between the headband and its padding.

After a lot more of nothing, he had to think for a while before he placed the items in a way that the 46692s touched. 

The result was not changed.

He spent majority of the night by trying to find the right combination or a method to release whatever special ability was locked in the card. He had literally infinite combinations to test, and the odds were that only one of them was the right one. He was feeling quite optimistic, nevertheless. After all, he had figured the earphones out fast, without even realizing there was something to figure out.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Word count: 50 k! 
> 
> The original/Finnish version has about 46 k. This version isn't actually longer, it just has more words :D Because of how the languages work. I expected to see higher word count than in the 1st version but I'm still surprised to see how much higher it's getting. I was guessing I'd be finishing with about 60 k but the master document has about 70 k right now and I expect it to grow when the re-write proceeds.

The first part of the laboratory work was building a heat engine using the equipment the laboratory had for that exact purpose: a glass syringe, bottle, two thermos boxes and weights from one to a hundred grams. The students were supposed to take temperature and pressure measurements throughout the cycle.

Renji had started to familiarize himself with the plan that morning, after sleeping about three and a half hours. He felt jittery from all the coffee he had downed, and just generally crummy. But now that the more complex theory questions were done, he was fairly optimistic about the work. It was straightforward enough.

“Support that, I’ll tighten it up,” Nanao ordered, referring to the syringe she was attaching to a stand.

Renji did as he was told, watching Nanao’s nimble fingers as she adjusted the clamp holder. When she was done, she double-checked with a spirit level.

The syringe didn’t have a needle, but a thin pipe that connected the syringe and the bottle. Nanao started the experiment by placing a weight on the plunger. The bottle on the thermos box began to fill with hot water.

Air in the bottle expanded and the volume reading on the syringe changed. Renji watched Nanao write pressure and temperature readings on the log sheet she had prepared beforehand. Just to be sure, she explained. The heat engine demo was supposed to run a cycle before they’d take the data, but she said it was better to record the data you didn’t need than need the data you didn’t record. Renji didn’t disagree.

“Why are you taking this course?” he asked Nanao, whose work was, while precise, not enthusiastic.

“It’s mandatory for chemical majors.”

“Oh.”

Nanao wrote down the next reading. “Why are you asking?”

“No real reason. You don’t look like you are holding your breath with excitement.”

“And you are?”

“Well, no.”

It was pretty obvious what was happening. The air was heating up and expanding, the small weight on the plunger keeping the pressure constant. After the plunder would reach a pre-set point, they’d remove the weight. The pressure would drop and the air expanded further. 

Then, they’d cool the bottle down in the ice bath, which Renji had prepared in the second thermos box. They’d watch the air cool and the volume reduce. Cycle número uno was done.

“I guess I was just thinking that you are always so diligent,” Renji explained his previous question. Nanao just scoffed.

“If it’s important enough to start, it’s important enough to do well. That doesn’t mean I’m not bored to tears. I just wish you could have come earlier. We’d be doing the second step now… Speaking of which, is it ok for you if we’d work on the report on Monday? I’m going to see my parents today and I’ll be back on Sunday.”

“Just say when you want me here.”

Nanao wrote down a new pair of temperature and pressure values. Then she opened her calendar and suggested they meet at three on Monday.

It was ok with Renji. It wasn’t like his calendar was full. In fact, he didn’t even have a calendar to fill.

The plunger rose slowly. This work was much like watching paint dry or grass grow, only it would let you think your own thoughts. Focusing on things was difficult enough when they weren’t so fucking boring.

Renji kept touching the headband on the earphones. It felt like plastic, but also organic. A bit like leatherette.

Why not?

“Nanao, hey?”

“Hmm?”

“I recently ran onto a number. You are good with numbers, right?”

“Somewhat. What about it?”

“The number I ran into, it’s kind of familiar. 46692. I can’t figure out what it is.”

Nanao thought of numbers: the PIN code of her phone and her phone number, the phone numbers of her friends and the method used for numbering illegally downloaded Grey’s Anatomy episodes. Then she thought of Shane Ross, and Shane Ross without a shirt on. Then the importance of following the heat engine crossed her mind.

“I don’t know, but I think you are right. It’s familiar.”

“Well, if it comes to you, let me know.”

Renji wasn’t disappointed. He hadn’t seriously thought Nanao would know anything, even though he suspected that she felt. He could tell by watching her. The way her lips made a tight line when she bit her teeth together. How her posture got rigid and knuckles turned white.

Funny thing, that he hadn’t picked up anything of it in her thoughts.

The plunger reached the level they had been waiting for. Renji removed the weight, Nanao wrote down the pressure and temperature. Renji opened the hot water bath box, she took the bottle out.

Renji pushed the hot water bath out of the way and replaced it with the ice bath. Nanao placed the bottle in.

They waited and watched the scale. Nanao wrote the values down.

“Are you sure there isn’t a missing decimal point?” she asked suddenly. 

“You are the scribe, not me.”

Nanao gave him a small smile. “No, I meant the number you spoke of. I think 4,669 is an approximate value of some constant used in chaos theory. I can’t remember what is was called, though.”

Renji felt his heart leap but didn’t show the excitement building up in his belly. “Thanks. But I don’t think anything is missing.”

The plunger moved down, up, down, up, down and one more time up and down. The three documented cycles were more than what was required, but Nanao said she wanted to get some idea about standard deviation. 

Renji would have had better places to be and better things to do, but it seemed like Nanao had forgiven him. He didn’t want to irritate her, even if watching the damn plunger meant he was missing lunch. 

“If you empty and dry the boxes, I’ll measure the volume,” Nanao said, when the fourth cycle finally finished.

Renji did as he was told. 

They took the demo engine apart and cleaned after themselves. Renji dropped the glass vial once, but was able to catch it before it hit the floor. 

Nanao told him to watch it, but he felt a wide grin forming on his face. The morning hadn’t been too good, true that, but things were certainly improving at a record-breaking pace. Knowing what the number meant might not find the grey-eyed consultant for him, but it would be a step to the right direction.

Not a step. A leap, a giant leap of a saber-toothed tiger on steroids.

If Nanao was right, he thought, trying to contain his expectation when walking home. She might not be, and even if she was, she had given only three decimals.

But he had a good feeling about it. 

When at home, he didn’t even kick his shoes off before he started to google again. This time he used the decimal point.

4.6692 - The first Feigenbaum constant when rounded to four decimal places. It gave you a limiting ratio between successive bifurcations. Renji would never have heard of it at all if Shuhei hadn’t made him enroll in that advanced dynamical systems class last semester so it wouldn’t get canceled for lack of interest. 

Fuck yeah!

“Fuck yeah!” he yelled and slammed the table with enough force to make the chipboard creak.

The numbers… well, didn’t make sense, per se, but he had the tools to make them make sense. 

He started to read about bifurcations. The first thing he learned was that the topic was complicated, and he’d have to sink some serious hours into it.

It didn’t matter. He’d read, and when he didn’t, he’d think ways to find the consultant.

The hours flew by in relative silence. The tabletop fan hummed and the fans in his computer whirred wildly. The thing was probably full of dust and would start to overheat soon. A lone fly had found its way in and seemed to think that if it kept flying against the window it would find the weak spot sooner or later.

About six in the evening, Renji, who had drank enough coffee to make a grown elephant do ballet, was startled by his phone ringing. The caller was Izuru.

Renji answered informally: “Hey fucker, are you trying to give me a heart attack or what?”

Izuru laughed. “Maybe so, given that you have gone old enough to forget what day it is.”

“Aha?”

“Friday,” Izuru explained helpfully. “It’s the day when we go out, talk shit about the teachers and have a beer or two.”

Renji had other plans. “I’ve got some schoolwork I have to get done.”

“I thought you quit most of your courses, and besides, since when has that been a problem? I’m craving action and couldn’t find any parties. Come and play some pool with me. Shuhei said he’s going with someone else. You are my only hope, dear boy.”

Most of his brain was occupied with Feigenbaum constant, but Renji asked anyway: “Who’s Shuhei with?”

“He didn’t say, I didn’t ask. What about it?”

“I just thought he wouldn’t have much interest for it, after Wednesday.”

“You were out earlier?” There was a touch of hurt in Izuru’s voice. “Why didn’t you call?”

Renji huffed. “Eh, no. He was having some lizard friends visiting again and I, being the fool I am, thought he wouldn’t be too thirsty for a week or two.”

“Maybe he’s got a woman to keep him company,” Izuru speculated, obviously losing what little interest he had had for Shuhei’s social life outside of their circle. “The point being, it’s Friday, and I’m all alone now. Momo says she’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, I have this schoolwork, and the place needs cleaning.”

The discussion went on for some time. Renji didn’t want to go; to hell with the cleaning, but the bifurcation thing was not about to research itself.

In the end he got bored with the phone call. He was supposed to hang up after telling Izuru to go fuck himself, but his mouth decided otherwise: “When?”

“Right now is good for me.”

“I’ll have to eat first. Which means I have to make some food.”

“We’ll never get going if you start to boil some goo. Come to our place, we have leftovers.”

Renji didn’t want to see Momo, but he was getting hungry, and didn’t look forward to eating anything cooked with his kitchenware. So he agreed.

* * *

“Remind me,” Renji half-yelled in attempt to be heard over the too-loud music, “what the fuck are we doing in here?”

Apparently Izuru didn’t hear him correctly. He answered with a nod and walked to the bar counter. Renji watched the bar tender to pour two shots of vodka, which Izuru paid for and walked back to their table.

“Cheers,” he mouthed, and the shots met the end of their brief existence.

“Thanks,” this time, there was no ‘half’ in yelling, “but I asked: what the fuck are we doing in here?”

“Drinking!”

“Yeah. Why here?”

“Why not?”

“The beer is expensive. The music is bad. Their take on air con is the bartender farting.”

Izuru laughed. Even Renji smiled, although he could think up quite a few places he’d rather be than Nieze, the night club-slash-bar-slash-pub of the island. 

“You never complained before!” Izuru pointed out, and Renji admitted readily that his friend wasn’t incorrect. The main concept of Nieze seemed to be minimizing any and every possible cost, but Renji liked the place. 

For starters, despite his complaints, the drinks actually were reasonably prized, compared to those of a real night club. Smoking was allowed indoors. If you could walk in under your own power, you got in. And when you got in, you were greeted by chairs saturated with cigarette smoke and spilled beer, tables bolted on the floor, and a pool table with a cloth so stained you could pass it off as a map.

But right now, Renji just wasn’t in the right mood to appreciate the place.

“Maybe I’ve grown up,” he offered.

“Enough to buy beer for a young boy like me?”

Renji understood the joke, but didn’t find it funny. “In here?”

“Where else?”

“The financial situation is kinda bad.”

“I’ll get us new ones, then.”

Izuru got up and again, this time with slight irritation in his movement, and Renji lit a cigarette. If he wasn’t in the right mood to appreciate Nieze, he wasn’t in the right mood to drink, either. He could feel the first stages of intoxication in his arms and legs, and his thoughts were stuck in a loop again. Also, the beer was warm. Nieze also cut costs by not keeping the beers properly chilled.

When Izuru returned and handed him a beer, Renji thanked him with a nod. The new beer was almost as warm as the previous one, and the few cubes of ice in it were melting fast. Like polar ice caps, he thought.

On the plus side, that thought wasn’t part of the previous pattern.

On the minus side, he wasn’t sure how long he could handle the place today. 

“Are you sure there isn’t a party somewhere?”

Izuru nodded. “Everyone is starting to get bored with the heat.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Renji said and raised his glass.

Izuru huffed in irritation. Was there a touch of worry, too? “Seriously, Renji, what’s wrong with you? You haven’tbeen acting like yourself.”

Yes, it was a touch of worry. Renji took a second to congratulate himself on this newest accomplishment of his. When Izuru was drinking, he usually had one worry in the world, and it was that there might not be enough beer.

“It’s nothing.”

“Momo says you’ve been behaving strangely.”

“How so?”

Izuru bit his fingernail. Hell, there was more worry in him than a touch. “She didn’t say, but I think she stayed home today so that she wouldn’t have to see you. Did you try to grope her or something?”

“What? No! Are you insane?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure.”

Maybe the whole thing was a dream, one of those dreams that felt more real and detailed than the reality itself. Renji looked at the clock, then Izuru, then the clock again. The black plastic hands had not moved.

Of course, that alone didn’t prove anything.

“Why would you think something like that?” Renji asked, shock giving way to irritation.

“She usually talks and talks and keeps talking till I go crazy. She’s been all silent now.”

“Well, I didn’t grope her.”

Izuru scratched his neck and took some time to answer. “What happened, then? At Rangiku’s?”

Renji drank rest of his beer in one go. The glass was full enough for it to take serious effort, but it gave him time to think.

It was as good as a time to come clean as any other time.

“Adult situations with a lady who wasn’t Kaya. Momo figured it out, but I didn’t have a chance to explain. She probably thinks I’m cheating on Kaya.”

Izuru nodded. “She has zero tolerance for that. Who did you get to bang? Rangiku?”

“I’d rather not say.”

Izuru didn’t press the point. “And Kaya?”

“Figuring things out with her ex.”

So much for coming clean with it. Well, what was a few more lies between friends?

Izuru nodded again and drank his beer. The song the DJ was playing changed during their silence, but the new song wasn’t any better than the last one. It was probably worse.

“Hey, sorry about that,” Izuru broke the silence. “After the murder, everything’s been going sideways somehow. Do you want to play some pool? The loser pays the next game and a vodka shot to the winner.”

Renji wanted to leave, go home and sleep it off.

He nodded and stood up.

Usually they were well-matched, but Renji wasn’t concentrating on the game. Izuru won the first match by three balls, the second by five, and the last one hung by the eight ball, which Izuru sank. After that, the difference in drinks was on Renji’s side. He won the fourth game.

When they were playing the fifth game, he noticed someone familiar on the counter. Tetsuzaemon was facing the bartender, but was easy to recognize anyway. He looked bigger than the damn fridge next to him.

When Tetsuzaemon turned around, Renji waved at him. He waved back, and when he and the man with him got their drinks, they walked to the pool table.

Renji had never seen the man in Tetsuzaemon’s company. That much he was sure of. The man was black, which alone was rare in the School Island, but he also had long, braided hair, and something seemed to be off around his eyes.

Renji didn’t stop to mull over it. He told his and Izuru’s names and offered his hand.

The man didn’t take the hand, but gave his name: “Kaname. Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Renji nodded. “Do you happen to know Shuhei?”

“Hisagi? Yeah, how did you know?”

“He mentioned he was showing the place to someone. He’s not here, is he?”

Kaname just shook his head, but Tetsuzaemon decided to add his two cents: “Wanted to, but he was too drunk to get in. We made him stay home.”

“Seriously?” without waiting for an answer Renji took the cigarette box out and offered one to Kaname. “Do you smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

Izuru was starting to show obvious signs of impatience (he was standing next to the pool table and pointing at the cue ball with index fingers of his both hands) but Renji took his time to light a cigarette and consider his options. He was playing stripes and had three balls left, versus Izuru’s four solids.

He decided on sinking the nine into the left corner and bended over the board to execute.

That was when it hit, the familiar but gut-wrenching, breath-taking horror, strong enough to tilt the world on its axis. His head hurt like his skull was being drilled open and his brain was being cut into the thinnest tissue samples possible. 

It took a split-second for the pain to subside, for the sharpest fear to dull. Renji realized he was staring at the pool table. The eight ball was nowhere to be seen, and the cue ball was decelerating on the opposite side of the table. 

He didn’t remember it, but the context made it clear he had taken the shot, blown it royally and lost.

“Yes, baby, yes!” Izuru celebrated the unexpected win. “Gimme, gimme!”

Renji felt more like crying than celebrating, and it took some time before he understood what Izuru wanted. He took out his wallet, fished up a bill and handed it to Izuru, who turned to walk towards the bar counter. Renji kept staring at his back. Fear was still sloshing uncomfortably in his stomach. 

“Are you two going to play?” Tetsuzaemon asked.

Renji heard the words, but had difficulty in understanding them.

“Sorry, what?”

“You and Izuru, are you going to play another?”

“Match of pool?” 

“No, the Chinese checkers you just finished.”

“I don’t know, probably not. You two can have the table.”

“Thanks, but I don’t play. My eyes aren’t good enough to let me.” Renji heard Kaname say. He gave a quick glance to Kaname, and his mind conjured up an image. 

It was from Shuhei’s memory. Not from their shared childhood, but one of the more recent memories. A folding knife twisted, and the blade locked on and off its place in a hand of a dark-skinned man.

Kaname’s hand.

“What are you?” Renji asked, and regretted the words immediately.

Kaname’s face suggested confusion. “Sorry?”

“I mean,” Renji tried to salvage the situation, “I meant to ask, what are you doing, like if you have a job, or if you are a student. I’d guess not seeing too well would give you some limitations?”

“Oh, yeah. I have a day job in IT support. I’m the guy who tells grannies to make sure their computer is switched on and plugged in. It’s not too bad after a while, actually, but I’m more into programming.” 

Unable to come up with an answer, and unable to tell if Kaname was being honest or not, Renji just nodded.

Tetsuzaemon was quick to change the topic, and Izuru came back with two shots, one of which he downed after handing the other to Renji.

Renji ended up sitting with Kaname while Izuru and Tetsuzaemon played. He wanted to think Kaname’s thoughts but didn’t dare to.

He tried not to stare, too, but found that difficult. 

Holy fuck in Hell, had he really, seriously found someone else with an item, and by accident? The odds to that! 

And he, the idiot, had no idea on how to proceed. None of the scenarios he had run in his mind was even close to a chance meeting with an almost-blind man in Nieze.

To say anything would be better than to say nothing, wouldn’t it?

But the fear was rearing its ugly head again. Everything felt like it was wrapped in heavy, malicious thoughts that leaked into Renji’s mind and mixed with his thoughts where his mind began and the minds of others started.

The silence between Renji and Kaname was filled with beats of dance music and clacking of pool balls. Renji tried to watch the game instead of Kaname. Tetsuzaemon did not play exceptionally well, but he ended up winning with a good margin, and Izuru bought two shots of vodka.

Renji took Tetsuzaemon’s shot after enduring a lengthy explanation on how alcohol hampered body-building and should be enjoyed in moderation. The vodka was of poor quality and warm, and didn’t taste good. 

“We should probably go home,” Kaname said, “if we are going to hit the gym tomorrow.”

Tetsuzaemon agreed. Renji wanted to agree out loud, too, but could only listen to Izuru, who put his skill of persuasionto test by trying to make the newly found company stay. He was not successful.

Soon after, Izuru and Renji left the bar with Tetsuzaemon and Kaname. The bartender smiled at them and wished them come again.

Despite the late time, a strong wind came from the sea. It was a warm wind (of course it was), but Renji couldn’t help feeling it was ominous, too. It rustled the leaves on the trees and lifted dust from the dry soil. A tiny tornado revealed itself in the blue light of Nieze’s neon sign when the four of them walked past.

It was not a good night to be out, and it was a bad night to walk home alone. 

At home, the wind would make the windows whistle. It would snarl and growl on the walks like living things. They clutched the concrete with their long black nails, hid in the shadows and had faces without eyes, and Renji knew he’d be too afraid to keep any window open.

He had left the windows open. 

He couldn’t go home.

“Izuru hey, do you mind if I sleep at your place?”

Renji could see Izuru hesitating, but he nodded. “I’ll have to call Momo and make sure.”

When Tetsuzaemon and Tousen took a different direction, Izuru called. Renji had some heart ache, he explained, as Kaya had cruelly dumped him some time ago, so if Momo didn’t mind, he’d stay for the night.

The wind was too loud for Renji to hear her answers, but Izuru’s face told him he was welcome. It was a major relief.

“It didn’t go quite like that,” he told Izuru, referring of being cruelly dumped.

“Close enough, and I just got you out of your adult situation situation.”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The walk from Nietze to Izuru’s and Momo’s place was not long, but there were shortcuts without streetlights. Especially the dark parts seemed to gain in length. Tens, no, hundreds of pairs of eyes glowed in rose bushes, and there was movement behind the windows of nearby buildings, except that there was none when Renji looked closer.

A part of him wanted to know what it all was about. Another, much larger part just wanted to be somewhere else as soon as possible, but without triggering the hunting instinct of whatever it was. Soon he didn’t dare to look at the rose bushes or windows at all.

Izuru, who was somewhere between tipsy and drunk, didn’t seem to notice his fear, the eyes or the movement. Renji felt too scared to really listen to his constant chatter, but gave an occasional nod. 

When the door of Izuru’s and Momo’s building closed, Renji was so happy he felt his eyes water. There were no shadows for anything to hide, nor wind to carry something so unbelievably horrible.

Momo waited them in the apartment. She was already wearing her pyjamas, and there was a spare mattress on the living room floor. Its pillowcase and bed sheets had an overly cheesy circus pattern of ponies, carousels and teddy bears on unicycles, Renji noted. He had made fun of the print a few times in a distant past, and suspected that Momo remembered and gave him the set each time as a joke.

The familiarity of the print was comforting, and Momo gave him a hug.

“Izuru told me about Kaya,” she explained, probably because she saw Renji’s confusion.

“Oh.” His hand moved into his hair. “It wasn’t that bad, we weren’t even together for real. I think he made it sound more serious that it was.”

Momo smiled. “You don’t have to say it’s ok if it isn’t. Are you guys hungry? I prepped us some snacks we can warm up real quick.”

They could use some food, and Momo hurried to the kitchen. She had prepared sandwiches and taken out a sandwich grill – a fairly recent impulse purchase of her mother, who had given it away after a couple test uses, she explained.

Renji liked the sandwiches and ate with a good appetite, although the wind howling outside was still spooking him out. The grill gave some crunch to the bread, and when it came to cooking, Momo was a good friend to have.   
  
It was late enough for the building rules to forbid noise, but all three took turns to take a shower before going to sleep. It was just too hot not to. The temperature hadn’t gotten any better by Momo closing the windows in the living room. They caught the cross-draught when it was so windy, and constant opening and closing of the windows made noise to wake the dead.

That night, Renji was happy to take the temperature over the open windows. He was the last one to shower, and when he was getting ready to sleep, Izuru and Momo were already in their bedroom, behind a closed door.

Renji switched the lights off and lay down, but sleep proved elusive. The drink alone would have made it difficult to sleep, but the noise outside was a larger issue. The wind was growling and tapping against the windows. 

The wind. Not the black eyeless creatures that walked the vertical concrete of the building like birds in one of the documentaries Shuhei was so fond of.

The curtains were thin and almost lacey, and as it was the living room, there were no windowsills. Renji could see the orange glow of streetlights behind the windows.

It meant that one could see from outside to inside, too.

He had feared the dark as a child. He had hidden from things that lurked in the shadows by making a cocoon of his blanket. Only his mouth and nose had been visible, and always facing the wall he had slept next to.

It was more than 15 years since the last time.

Making the cocoon had been a lot easier back then. Now it was difficult to make sure that everything from his toes to strands of hair were covered. 

He was able to fall asleep for a minute, maybe two at a time, but was constantly woken by the sound of the wind. The fear he felt was worse each time. He wanted to cry, but didn’t dare to make a tiniest sound. He had to keep still and quiet.

When Renji finally undid the cocoon, it wasn’t because of bravery.

The bathroom was windowless, and he could keep the lights on and lock the door. He was quiet in that, too, but when he turned around, he saw movement. 

It was his own image in the bathroom mirror, but the fear took his breath for a while.

He sat down, next to the washing machine and facing the door. He stared at the lock and the handle, and almost expected to hear the growling behind the door and see the handle to move.

He didn’t know how long it was until sunrise, but it had to be hours. The time was crawling. The light in the room was cold, fluorescent. The washing machine next to him was emitting the artificial smell of washing powder. He did his best not to think anyone’s on anything’s thoughts, but the intent of malice hung heavy around him. 

Steps sounded behind the door, not those of clawed limbs but bare feet touching the vinyl floor. The steps got closer, until they stopped. The door handle moved down, then up.

Renji was chewing his hair and hoping that whoever was at the door would go away.

Time continued to crawl. There were no more steps, but after a while, the someone knocked on the door.

Renji sat still and chewed his hair. There was another knock.

“Renji?” 

It was Momo’s voice.

”Renji, are you ok?”

He had to answer, and he wished he had gone home anyway. He, too, had a bathroom without windows worth mentioning and a door that locked.

“Yeah.” Even his own voice sounded hollow and was spooking him out. “I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t want to switch the light on. I came in here to read.”

“Would you open the door? I have to pee.”

He didn’t want to open the door, but didn’t want to say that he was afraid to either. Momo was standing alone in the dark, after all.

“Just a second.”

He needed some time to collect the himself, to rouse the bravery needed. He was able to turn the lock, but opening the door was left for Momo.

“You are not ok,” she said immediately, when she saw him. “Please don’t say that you are, because I can see you aren’t.”

His brain didn’t know how to react. His mouth was quick with the lie: “I had a panic attack and I didn’t want to bother you two. It’s about to pass.”

“You can bother us if you need us. For real. Do you want to talk about it?”

He didn’t, but the thought of going back to the spare mattress was even worse. “Not really, but if it is ok for you, please don’t go back to sleep just yet.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Not be alone.”

Momo nodded. “I’ll have to pee first, but I’ll stay with you.”

Renji stepped out of the bathroom. He was in the dark, but some light escaped under the bathroom door. It occurred to Renji that by keeping the light on he had given out his location, but he did his best to ignore the thought as irrational.

Momo opened the door soon and let Renji back into the light.

The sunrise was only few hours away. He spent most of the hours by sitting in the bathroom floor, leaning on its wall, sometimes asleep but mostly awake. Momo stayed with him in silence.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tuesday! I skipped one because (a) I'll have to write faster or I'll run out of stuff to post and (b) it was when the US presidential election was, so I figured everyone would be busy watching what happens to DT :)
> 
> This story is getting closer to the end... I'm actually about to write the last few paragraphs, but there is ofc editing and beta (thank you, Polynya, this wouldn't be happening without you!) and more editing still to go.

Renji woke up when he heard Izuru moving in the kitchen. He just knew it was Izuru. Momo would have been quiet and let him sleep longer.

And sleep was what he wanted. He felt more hungover than he should have. Everything ached, and his mouth tasted like ferret farts smelled. It was the cumulative lack of sleep, he thought, and the previous night hadn’t helped any.

“What’s the time?” he croaked and was not surprised to hear he also _sounded_ hungover.

“About ten,” Izuru half-yelled from the kitchen, sounding so happy he made Renji feel even worse. “You sound like you could use food. Do you want some?”

“A bit later. Thanks.”

He tried to sleep, but couldn’t. He couldn’t even tell apart all the different unpleasant sensations he was feeling. Why didn’t he have a toothbrush with him?

“How did you sleep?” he asked Izuru, who was, judging by the sounds, making toast with jam. There was the low ka-chunk of the toaster finishing, followed by the sounds of a metallic lid sliding open and a spoon hitting glass. It was probably good jam.

Izuru walked from the kitchen to the living room. “Great, I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. Why do you ask?”

“You sound perky. I slept for shit. What are you having?”

“Toast, yogurt and strawberry jam.” Izuru was wearing ratty sweatpants and his hair was a mess, but Renji didn’t give rat’s ass of his friend’s fashion choice. His attention focused the two bowls Izuru was holding. He was too nauseous to feel hungry, but he had to get his sugar levels up to get the day going.

The same applied for caffeine and nicotine levels. He wanted to smoke, but walking outside to do so was too much work.

On the bright side, he was no longer afraid of going out.

Izuru handed him one of the bowls, sat down and turned on the TV. The newscast was about to start.

Renji ate the yogurt and the jam, listening to the TV. None of the news held any special interest for him. It was the same old conflicts, the same old politicians, and the same old celebrities with their drama that, no surprise here, was starting to get really old.

Momo wasn’t up yet, but she would surely be up before noon. Renji didn’t look forward for meeting her, and after eating, he started to collect the few things he had with him. 

“I think I’ll go home,” he said, when Izuru didn’t seem to take the hint.

“Already? I can make coffee if you want.”

“Thanks, but no. I don’t have a change of clothes or anything with me and I’m so fucking tired I just want to go home, shower and sleep for a week.”

“Do you remember when we used to get sloshed when we were younger?” Izuru asked, a smile on his face. “And then do nothing but watch cartoons the next day?”

Despite himself, Renji let out a laugh. “Do I hear nostalgia? You can’t seriously miss being so hungover you couldn’t move a muscle without puking your guts out.”

Izuru admitted he didn’t miss that part. “But there was something special about that time,” he explained. “We were like the three musketeers. That’s what I miss sometimes. I’ve been thinking it, especially after that murder. The good old times.”

Renji suddenly felt like telling some truths about who it was that had moved forward so fast, leaving the two other musketeers to eat dust, but he settled for a nod. It wasn’t fair to fault Izuru for finding something that had been so elusive for both himself and Shuhei.

He was out after a brief goodbye.

It was still hot, but perhaps not as hot as the previous day. It was still windy, but not as windy as the previous night. The wind didn’t carry any threat, either. It was simply pleasant, and with a touch of the sea, as it often was on the School Island. It also carried the cigarette smoke away as fast as Renji exhaled it. He watched the swirls disintegrate, then disappear from view.

Perhaps the Indian summer was coming to its end.

Renji thought about taking the long road home, but almost immediately decided against it. A police car drove past, reminding him that he didn’t want to be seen too close to Orihime’s building, or, preferably, at all. On top to that, walking made his legs and back ache even more, and his temples were pounding.

There were only six cigarettes left. He smoked one at the smoking area of his apartment building.

The lift was broken, so Renji was forced to take the stairs to his apartment. Someone had broken a beer bottle in the staircase. He could feel the glass crushing further on each step, and the soles of his shoes stuck on the already dry puddle.

The whole staircase stank of stale beer. The smell was so nauseating Renji ended up holding his breath until the apartment door closed behind his back.

Home sweet home. 

He went to the bathroom, took off his clothes and squeezed toothpaste into his mouth. Bye, and never meet you again, the taste of ferret farts, Renji thought. Even the taste of metal that still lingered in the tap water was a major improvement over it.

Renji was still showering when he heard his phone ringing. It rang for some time before it occurred to him that the caller was probably Momo, who undoubtedly wanted to check if he was ok. If he didn’t pick up, she might tell Izuru about last night, although she had almost promised to not to.

The caller wasn’t Momo. The number was unknown to Renji, but he answered anyway, mainly hoping it was Ichigo on a new phone.

“Hi, this is Tetsuzaemon”, the caller identified himself, and Renji could tell by the voice he was who he claimed to be. “Izuru gave me your number, I hope you don’t mind. Do you remember Kaname? The guy I was with yesterday?”

“Sure. You don’t seriously think I was drunk enough to forget?” His hair was dripping water onto the pile of shoes and he was naked, but not cold. Rather, he felt pleasantly cool, and therefore didn’t rush the conversation.

Tetsuzaemon ignored the question. “Did he mention to you that he might be going somewhere? Or something like that?”

“That gym thing, but otherwise, no. Why?”

“Well, he didn’t show up and I can’t reach him. I’ve been trying to call, but his phone isn’t on and there is no one in his apartment. I’m starting to worry something might have happened to him.”

Renji felt goose bumps forming on his skin. He glanced an open window. The sun was shining in, and the sky behind the glass was blue, cloudless.

“Could you ask the neighbours to check on him?”

“I did.” Tetsuzaemon’s voice carried worry. “The property maintenance said he couldn’t give me the keys but they agreed to come to check his place with me. It was empty. Not just like him not being in there empty, but there was hardly any of his stuff in it, not even furniture to speak of. Yesterday’s mail was on the floor.”

The ghost of previous day’s fear was making its way in. This time Renji kept it contained. “Maybe he just didn’t pick the mail up, and he’s just moving in, right? He is a grown man, why are you worrying so much?”

“The murdered guy was a grown man. I don’t know, I just feel like something’s being off.”

“You don’t feel--,” Renji was just able to stop himself from finishing with the word ‘fuck’, but couldn’t salvage the sentence. He could hear the leaves rustling in his mind, and could almost sense the hundreds of pairs of eyes on his person.

“Did you walk him home?” he asked instead.

“No, that’s a part of it. It wasn’t a long walk for him when we split, though, ten, fifteen minutes, tops.”

Renji thought about Rukia. It couldn’t have taken much more than a minute to take the stairs to the children’s home’s laundry room. “It doesn’t take much time for something to happen.”

“Gee, thanks. I feel a lot better now.”

Renji apologized and asked Tetsuzaemon to call him when he’d get a hold of Kaname. Tetsuzaemon promised to, and finished with the call.

Renji stared the phone screen till the light went off on its own. Things were starting to connect. The consultant, and the police cars driving around. Kaname’s knife. The fear, and the malice that had hung in the air.

It didn’t seem likely Kaname would be found alive.

Dead? Perhaps, but Renji wouldn’t count on him being found at all.

He tried to swallow down the lump in his throat. Rangiku, Orihime, Ichigo – were they in danger after all? Were they even _alive_?

And how acute was the danger he was in? If he hadn’t gone to Izuru’s place, would he be dead by now? Would Izuru be dead?

Whatever confinements he had built to keep the fear at bay, broke. It wasn’t the blind panic he had almost expected to feel. It felt like his survival instinct had kicked in and burned out whatever feelings and thoughts were hindering his survival. His mind was clear.

Well, maybe not that clear, he thought after picking up his phone that had ‘mysteriously’ ‘slipped’ from his fingers and hit the nearby wall.

The phone was off and the screen was cracked. Renji swore aloud and attempted to switch the thing on. If something went wrong, the phone was his last chance, along with the good old cooking knife he’d make sure to keep in his person from now on. All. The. Time.

The phone did switch on, and Renji called Izuru. One never knew, maybe all the… phone call functions were dead.

“Hi,” he heard Izuru’s voice, which crackled a bit more than usual, but otherwise sounded just fine.

“Hi,” Renji answered, “I dropped my phone and wanted to make sure it still works. Seems like that?”

“Yeah, there is some background noise but nothing too bad… Hey, did you speak with Tetsuzaemon?”

Renji nodded out of habit. “He called me. That was some weird shit.”

“True that. I hope you don’t mind I gave your number to him. I’m actually a bit spooked. I mean, we were out there walking at the same time than he was.”

“Maybe he just forgot to show up and is with some other friend at the moment. I mean, it doesn’t mean he is dead or disappeared if he doesn’t answer his phone, right?”

“I know,” Izuru admitted. “I don’t know, maybe I’m having some super strange worrywart’s hangover, or maybe it’s just watching Momo. She is completely freaked out again. She has convinced herself thinking the original culprit is still somewhere on the island.”

Renji’s heart leaped. Could it really be…?

“Maybe you should try to speak some sense into her?” he suggested, doing his best to keep the voice even.

Izuru hmph’d. “No wonder you aren’t dating anymore. Here’s a tip: when a woman is scared, never, ever try to ‘speak some sense into her’. There’s only one way for things to go from that, which is, to utter shit.”

Renji admitted he didn’t know much of how women thought, assuming they thought any differently than men. He wasn’t too sure of that.

After the call ended, he found the knife and took it with him into the bathroom. Things had gotten to the point in which he simply couldn’t be too careful.

* * *

The Monday was 13th day of the month. Renji had never thought himself as superstitious, but the date was not making him any happier.

He had to go to school. To go to school, he had to go out. 

He didn’t want to. He wasn’t ready, not yet.

As long as he stayed in his apartment, he was relatively safe. If someone opened a window, the knives, spoons and forks stuck between the frames would fall and the noise would warn him. If someone somehow broke a window without a sound, they’d have to move a curtain to come in, and the empty soda and beer cans attached on the curtains would rattle like crazy. And the cooking knife was always close.

But he had to go to school or he’d risk drawing attention.

There was also a practical side of things. He hadn’t bought any groceries for some time, and was running low on things to eat. His previous meal had been a glass of water, and the one before it, plain macaroni. He didn’t even have ketchup or canned tuna left. No milk to eat cereal with. No crackers. No canned beans. The taste of whatever it was that had destroyed his foodstuff had found its way even into the flour.

It was about twelve o’clock. He was supposed to meet Nanao at three in the school library.

Three hours to either excuse himself from meeting her, or to get a grip and go.

Renji decided to work the problem by popping two nicotine tablets. Technically speaking, taking more than one was not allowed, but he needed to calm down and start focusing.

If he went, he’d need the knife, his earphones and Rangiku’s card with him. 

He still had no idea about what the card did. He had a vague feeling he’d crack it any minute now, but the actual breakthrough simply was not there. It was frustrating, to say the least.

He decided on wearing Shuhei’s cargo shorts because he found that the knife almost fit in one of the pockets. The handle was at risk of sticking out, but he found an ancient phone cover he was able to fit the handle in. The knife wouldn’t be too obvious, if someone should spot something.

So he left.

Someone had cleaned the staircase. The beer puddle and glass were gone, but there were new scratches on the floor and the smells of old beer and fresh cigarette smoke lingered. The bar smell. He had run out of cigarettes on Saturday, meaning that someone else was smoking indoors.

Good. It was one microscopically small problem less for him to worry about.

On the first floor, the smell of frying food mixed with the bar smell. When he opened the front door, air flowed in. It was warm and moist air, and made Renji think of something big breathing. The hallway was its mouth, the doormat its tongue. 

He stopped to watch for a while, but no one was anywhere he could see, except ants that had made their nest next to the street inlet. Their tracks lead to grass where they vanished between the tall green blades.

Again, it was the quiet hours. Renji couldn’t decide if it was a bad or a good thing. He could see anyone coming, which was a plus, but he was missing the security of a crowd.

On the way to school, he saw only two people. The first one was a man carrying a groceries to his home, or something to somewhere in a plastic bag printed with the market’s logo. The man took a different street soon enough.

The second was a woman walking a dog. When she came closer, Renji realized the dog was Spot, and the girl holding the leash was Tatsuki. Still closer, Spot started to wiggle his tail and pull at the leash, clearly wanting to come and meet Renji.

Tatsuki stood still for a while. Spot calmed down. 

Renji didn’t fear Tatsuki too much, but as he walked past her, he kept his hand on the knife handle. 

Tatsuki didn’t even acknowledge his existence.

He was at school with enough time to eat a late lunch. He lucked out in the sense than the cafeteria was serving sweet curry chicken. In a fancy restaurant he wouldn’t order something like that, but it was good by the cafeteria standards. Not gooey, and there was taste beyond sodium glutamate.

Less luckily, the days of poor nutrition had gotten to him. After only a couple bites he lost his appetite. Eating became an unpleasant task, and after managing to swallow less than half of the food he gave up. He left, leaving his tray at the table.

He walked to WC near the library, took the last stall and locked its door. He sat on the lid and lifted his feet onto it. So that they’d be hidden from anyone coming in.

It wasn’t a comfortable position, but made him feel somewhat safe. No one even tried to open the door, and Renji burned some time by reading the writings on the walls. Song lyrics, dirty pictures, different variations of fuck yous and urban aphorisms were widely presented, but his attention was mainly focused on an almost skilful drawing. It was a woman’s left hand with a smooth ring on her ring finger.

Renji thought he recognized Izuru’s drawing style, but wouldn’t have bet too much on it.

He didn’t get to wait for long before he had to leave the relative safety and go to meet Nanao. The library was as full as he had expected. Nanao was already waiting him, laptop resting on the table in front of her.

Nanao looked up when Renji approaced. She adjusted her glasses and greeted him with a brief nod.

“Hi,” Renji said and cleared his throat. His voice seemed to be off, thanks to lack of use. “Good thinking, the laptop.”

”We’d be waiting for a work station for whooping forever… I have another meeting in two hours. Shall we start?”

“Sure.”

”Good. Did you do any digging?”

“Uh.” He hadn’t done one thing related to the report. “Not really. It isn’t too difficult, I think?”

To his relief, Nanao didn’t seem angry. Either she agreed, or had accepted that Renji wasn’t going to be much of an asset.

“There are some things I think we should discuss a bit,” she said, fishing a pencil case from her briefcase. “I completed the calculations. The demo heat engine was surprisingly good, actually. It followed the theory as much as you can hope for. Just a sec, I’ll show you.”

Nanao found an USB memory stick in the pencil caseand attached the stick. The laptop recognized it immediately, and Nanao opened Excel and turned the laptop to face Renji. The heat engine was characterized clearly and neatly in table form. Nanao had even made a PV diagram.

For a second, Renji felt quite embarrassed. He praised the table, and said that he, too, had drawn something, but nothing as fancy. No point to go through the trouble of finding a free computer to check it out, as he hadn’t taken an USB memory with him.

He regretted the lie immediately. Nanao’s face told him she saw through it. She didn’t say anything, though, just fiddled with a divider she took from the pencil case, as if thinking about something.

The silence that fell was filled with the sounds of typing and students speaking quietly. It made Renji feel even more guilty.

Nanao broke the silence soon enough by asking his opinion about the report. 

He delivered the answers best he could, but soon found that he couldn’t concentrate on the task. How could he? Kaname was still missing, Momo afraid everything, he himself in shit so deep that it was taking all he had just to keep himself from drowning, and he wasn’t any closer to finding Rukia.

And he was supposed to be writing some stupid report?

“Hell, Renji, could you _please_ even try?”

Nanao’s words were sharp. Renji looked at her, a young woman in a black blouse and dark jeans. Her delicate facial features, skin untanned despite the recent weather, lacking any trace of makeup. Even her glasses were plain, boring.

She lacked color. 

The bland woman, almost unfamiliar to him, was biting her thumbnail and holding the divider in her free hand.

Before he had time to react, before he even _fucking saw her moving_ , she had hit him with the divider. The sharp edge sunk into back of his hand.

Blood rushed out. The familiar fear of _feeling_ rushed in.

He let out a scream, and realized the other students were staring at him. He was standing up.

Nanao sat still, like she hadn’t moved at all. Her expression spoke of extreme surprise.

He glanced at his hand. The blood was gone. The skin on his hand was unmarred, but a dull ache remained as a reminder of the attack. 

“I,” he started, but didn’t know how to finish. 

He didn’t have time to figure it out. A wave of what he later thought of as _knowing_ came over him. For less than a second, he felt that he held all the knowledge in the world, no, in the whole damn universe. All he had to do was to think of it and he’d know it, remember it like he remembered yesterday. The boundaries between his self and the universal knowledge were gone.

It had to be the divider, he thought, still standing, and still being stared at.

_Knowing_ was already gone, so he couldn’t explain why, but he still knew that Momo’s fear wasn’t for nothing. Nanao would fear, too, if she knew what was good for her.

“You,” he tried again, but couldn’t word any warning. “Sorry, I’m not feeling well, I gotta go.”

He took his stuff and hurried away. Nanao called after him, he thought, but didn’t know for sure. It could have been someone else, or an echo of some kind.

He’d find his friends. He’d make sure everyone was ok and would stay that way. There was no keeping secrets any longer.

When he was sure Nanao wasn’t following him, he stopped to call Momo. The lazy beeping signalled that the line had connected, but she wasn’t picking up. He waited until the call disconnected.

He tried calling again. The result was the exact same.

He called to Izuru. There was no answer.

Rangiku didn’t answer, either.

Ichigo, no answer.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally I'm updating this! I have a huge work/school-related writing project (aka thesis) that's trying to eat my soul. The chapter needed some edits that I wanted to run through my wonderful beta Polynya, and it took me a while to get them done (refer to: the first sentence of the note). 
> 
> So no real drama in my life or likes, I've just been lazying off xD

Renji was practically leaning on Izuru’s and Momo’s doorbell. He tried to tell if it was actually ringing, but heard nothing.

Had he been able to hear the doorbell before? All the times he had visited them, and never thought of that.

No one opened the door.

Perhaps the doorbell was broken.

Maybe it worked perfectly, and the apartment was empty. 

The third option was too horrible to think, but Renji thought about it anyway.

His options were calling to Shuhei, or starting to ring random doorbells to get in the staircase. The latter hadn’t gone too great the last time. He noticed his hands shaking when he unlocked his phone and searched for Shuhei’s number.

The line connected. The phone rang for a long while, but Shuhei did eventually pick up.

“I can’t get ahold of Momo or Izuru,” Renji said, going straight to the business. “I tried to call them, neither answered. I’ve been ringing their doorbell, but no one’s opened.”

Shuhei remained quiet. The line was still open, though. Renji could hear the background noise, a low, rhythmic crunching that just kept repeating.

Where the fuck was Shuhei? 

“What’s that sound? Where are you? Are you ok?”

“Renji, calm down.” Shuhei couched a bit, but it sounded fake. “I’m fine. I’m at work, standing next to a printer and printing an article thicker than Lord of the Rings trilogy and the holy fucking Bible stacked together. It’s probably the printer you are hearing. What’s the matter?”

Renji did calm himself down, albeit only slightly. “I can’t get ahold of Momo or Izuru,” he repeated.

“They aren’t probably home from school, it’s not even four yet. You sound like something real bad has happened. Are you ok?”

Renji felt like kicking himself, and hard. Shit, Shuhei was probably right. In his freaked-out state, he had somehow managed to forget it was a school day, despite coming from school himself. And now he had to explain himself somehow. 

Shuhei was directly involved through Kaname and the knife and needed to know the truth. But Renji couldn’t give it to him on the phone. His brain was drawing a blank, and even his mouth, recently so adept in telling lies, couldn’t make one up.

“Are you still there?” Shuhei asked.

“What did you say? The line’s poor.”

“I can hear you just fine. I asked what’s happened and if you are ok.”

Renji covered the microphone. “What? I can’t hear you.”

“What?”

“What did you say?”

“What?”

Renji disconnected the call.

Shuhei was probably right, he reminded himself. Momo and Izuru were ok. They were at school, most likely. They’d come home soon enough. 

He just had to wait. He’d stand next to the door, resting his hand on the knife and ready to call the emergency services if it came to that. The earphones rested around his neck, and he could feel the card radiating heat onto his back even through the backpack.

Shuhei called him back, but he didn’t answer.

* * *

It was about half past four when Renji heard someone walking. He recognized the steps before he saw Momo. She wore modest heels, pretty and always oh-so-practical, and when she came closer, Renji heard her handling her keys. The bells she had attached on her keys chain sung quietly, but loudly enough to be heard in the silence that was late Monday afternoon on the School Island.

“Hi,” Renji greeted, when Momo stepped into his view. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he continued. Momo had practically jumped out of her skin.

“I almost had a heart attack!” 

“Sorry,” Renji repeated, more interested in getting indoors than apologizing. “I have something important to tell you and Izuru. Where is he? Can we go in?”

“He stayed to wrap up a lab report,” Momo said, opening the door and walking in. Renji followed a couple steps behind.

As Momo was opening the apartment door, Renji realized that if someone was waiting in the apartment, tiny and unprepared Momo would have no chance.

“Wait!” 

But she was already in the apartment.

For a split-second, Renji thought he saw a person-shaped shadow falling over her, but it disappeared before he had time to do as much as yell a warning.

Momo turned her face to him. “Sorry?”

“Uh, nothing.”

Momo sat down and took off her shoes in heavy silence. 

“Would you like a cup of tea?” she asked after a while. “Or I could make coffee, if you’d prefer. And we have cookies.”

Her speech was off, Renji noted. The wording was too formal, even for her, and her tone was stiff somehow. But it was perfect, to have Momo in the kitchen while he gave the living room a good look. 

“Coffee, thanks.”

Momo disappeared into the kitchen. Renji heard her running the tap while he checked out her bookshelves .

They were Izuru’s bookshelves, too, he supposed. It was just that most of the stuff clearly wasn’t his. The decorative items on them were cute, girly. Fragile pink porcelain that Rangiku’s apartment had lacked, which was also something Renji hadn’t been much interested in. Until now, when the dots had connected.

There were some photos of Momo’s family and friends, including a large photo of Momo and Izuru, taken on the day they had graduated high school. A porcelain dog holding a bucket of pale pink and yellow flowers in its mouth. A sparrow of frosted glass. Next to those was an ornamental Moroccan perfume bottle, and the one thing that didn’t belong.

The thing that didn’t belong was a fairly large marble statue portraying a naked woman. It lacked its head and most of its arms and legs, but had enormous breasts and ass to put Kardashian sisters to shame. Pink tank top and a skirt of the same color, presumably put on for modesty or as a joke by Momo, did a poor job in hiding perky marble nipples and well-formed buttocks.

The thing seemed to fucking shimmer. It wasn’t like a cheaply made glow shown in movies, not at all. It was much more subtle. Like fireflies on white gold dust under a full moon, Renji thought when taking the statue. Not that he had ever seen white gold dust, under full moon or otherwise, but it was what the shimmering made him think. It was so easy to miss the fireflies, to think them as mere tricks of moonlight.

Renji flipped the statue over and proved himself correct. There was an engravement on the bottom of the stand, looped cursive ornamental enough to give him difficulties when he tried to read it. It was a love message:

_She walks in beauty, like the night_   
_of cloudless climes and starry skies_   
_\- Lord Byron_

_To the object of my undying love_   
_Cornway Street 46692 / A.S._

  
Renji wouldn’t say he was familiar with poetry, but he was vaguely familiar with the poet. But it wasn’t the poem, or the inscription that interested him, it was the numbers. Date perhaps? It could read to year -92, but the 466 made no sense. Perhaps a street address, but that would spell one long ass street. 

In the larger scheme of things, fuck whatever the 466 stood for. What was important was that the numbers were there. They confirmed that Momo, too, was even more directly involved than Renji had previously thought.

It didn’t do any good to prolong the situation. Renji took the statue and walked to the kitchen with it. 

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, placing the statue on the table.

Momo, who was currently going through the fridge to pile milk, cookies and such on the table, took a quick glance over at Renji and the statue.

“Some sort of a Venus statue, I don’t know who made it. What about it?”

Renji didn’t answer the question. “Where is it from?”

Momo closed the fridge. The table was already set. “It was my mom’s. She got it from my father when they were still together, and we found it from our storage unit when I was in… no, I think it was the summer before I started high school.”

The coffee maker finished, and Momo moved to pour the coffee. “Mom wanted to throw it away because she hadn’t been thinking highly of dad after he left. I said that I wanted to have something to remind me of him, so I took it. Say when.”

The last remark was about the coffee. Renji ignored it, and Momo finished with the pour when the coffee cup was about to flood over.

“Do you know where your dad got it from?”

“No. I’ve been thinking I should put it back into the storage.” Momo’s brows knitted. “It’s not that pretty and people keep lifting the skirt and commenting about the nipples.”

Renji closed his eyes and tapped the table. How should he put it?

“It’s a bit more than just a statue. Are you seriously saying you know nothing about it?”

“I’m sorry, Renji, but you are not making any sense. You have seen that,” Momo tilted her head towards the statue, “about a million times. Shuhei tried to call and then texted me that you tried to find me and Izuru, and then wouldn’t answer his calls. You look like someone died. What’s happening?”

“I think Kaname did. Die, I mean. They still haven’t found him, last that I heard.”

Momo nodded and sat down. “I called Shuhei after I got his text, just today. I asked about Kaname and he told me they filed a missing person report, but the police weren’t too worried. He said that they said Kaname is a grown man and no one else was asking after him, from work or anything, so he probably just left without mentioning it to them.”

“Of course they’d say that,” Renji answered, feeling that they were swerving out of topic. They were too late to help Kaname, anyway.

“It says 46692 on the stand of your statue,” he said to re-focus himself as well as the discussion.

Momo nodded again. She remained quiet.

Renji took the earphones off and placed them on the table. They hadn’t even been plugged in on anything. Then he reached to his backpack to find the post card.

“Check the postal code and what it reads on the headband,” he told Momo, whose worried look was quickly turning into confusion.

She checked the items, though. “Funny thing.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry, Renji, but I’m still not getting what you are trying to tell me.”

The damn girl really didn’t understand, Renji thought, and suddenly felt extremely angry. He slammed the table with both hands, hard enough to spill coffee on the tablecloth.

Momo’s worry-slash-confusion turned into obvious fear. Renji closed his eyes and inhaled deeply a couple times.

“Let me start from the beginning,” he said and opened his eyes.

“I think that would be for the best.” 

Momo was still looking scared, but Renji ignored it. He tried not to rant, but at some point, he started to suspect that that part of coming clean wasn’t going well.

“I know you feel things, scary things that other people don’t. Like you did at the party, when Gin got killed. I feel them, too, and I’ve been investigating this shit and I’ve cracked it. A part of it, anyway. It’s because all of us have had exposure to the some special stuff that has made us sensitive.

“Me, Izuru and Shuhei were first exposed when Rukia went missing, and you have that statue thing. Nanao has a compass and Ichigo’s mom used to have a wristwatch. Rangiku had the card and that gold bottle necklace of hers, Kaname had a knife. Izuru said you’ve been scared after that, after Kaname disappeared, I mean, and I think you are right to be. There is one guy, here in the School Island, who works as a consultant to cops. He was there when Rukia went missing, so I think he killed Kaname to get the k--”

“Renji!” Momo interrupted, fairly sharply. For a while she looked like she wanted to say something else, but finished with, “please slow down.”

It felt good, to tell it all. How he had been the first one at the murder scene, how he had taken the earphones and gone to the mainland to find Rukia, not to meet some girl who didn’t actually even exist. How dangerous it was for, all of them. People had already died or gone missing, and while there was no evidence, he didn’t think the high school teacher had offed herself.

Momo listened, quiet and serious. Renji felt relieved to see she wasn’t trying to chalk it up as a joke, or something along those lines. His coffee was getting cold, and Izuru still wasn’t home. 

“So,” Renji finished, and downed the coffee in one gulp, “what do you think we should do?” 

“I… I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry, but I have no idea how I should answer that.” 

“I’m not angry. I don’t know what to do, either. I’m just thinking we’ll all end badly if we can’t figure this out.”

“Uh,” Momo said, nodding and chewing her thumb nail. “We’d better wait for Izuru. I don’t think it’ll take long for him to come home. In the meanwhile, would you like something? Dinner isn’t ready, I’ll have to cook, but another cup of coffee perhaps?” 

“No thanks, I ate at school not that long ago anyway. You don’t have any smokes, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s ok, I still have a dozen or so nicotine tablets left.”

Momo didn’t answer, and the silence was one of the heavy ones. Renji, however, was feeling quite good with it. Momo clearly wasn’t happy, but who in their right mind would be, after hearing such news? Now she knew, if nothing else, and sharing the burden simply felt good. 

Renji took the earphones, put them around his neck and reached for the nicotine tablets. He was staring the post card and the statue, and considered thinking Momo’s thought.

He decided against it. It didn’t feel proper, to pry like that.

Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know what Momo was thinking. She wasn’t moving a finger to cook. Her hand rested around the coffee cup, the contents of which undoubtedly were lukewarm at best. The statue and the post card were still on the table, untouched.

“Do you need help with the food?” Renji offered.

Momo’s eyes moved from the statue to Renji as if she had just awakened. She gave a small, if somewhat weak smile. “If you want to, you could wash the veggies. We were thinking tofu wok.”

Renji nodded, and Momo stood up. She poured the coffee down the drain, opened the fridge and took out tofu, carrots, bell peppers and sugar peas.

It wasn’t the first time Renji had helped Momo out in the kitchen, so he knew well where to find things. He started with the bell peppers and peas, and then moved to the carrots. Soil found its way under his nails and dirty water got splashed on his clothes, but the bright orange of the newly-washed carrots was almost stingingly bright.

After he finished with the carrots, Renji wiped the sink clean and waited for further instructions from Momo, who was cutting the bell peppers.

“Would you mind cleaning and setting the table?” Momo asked. “I’m sure Izuru will be in here shortly.” 

Renji started by taking the statue to its original place and placing the post card next to it. The damn card was still burning him, and did the statue shimmer more brightly when the card was in the proximity?

That was probably why he had never noticed the shimmering before. He hadn’t had the card.

Back in the kitchen he found that the coffee splashed during his outburst had already stained the tablecloth. He tried to clean it, which only spread it further. Momo told him not to worry about it, and he ended up putting a plate over the stain.

He sat down to wait. The smell of frying vegetables was delicious, and together with the sound of sizzling oil it made him feel… safe, maybe. Lack of sleep was getting to him, too, when he rested his head against the kitchen wall. He wasn’t truly asleep, but not fully awake either.

The apartment door opened. Renji could hear it opening and then closing. He straightened his pose and placed his hand on the knife handle, but recognized the familiar steps soon enough.

“It’s Izuru,” Momo supplied quickly and started to walk toward the door. Renji stopped her with his left hand – the one that didn’t rest on the knife.

“Hi,” Izuru hollered, “is Renji in here?”

“Yes,” Momo hollered back. Renji loosened his grip on her, but she didn’t move. He could hear Izuru walking into the bathroom and running the tap.

Soon Izuru joined them in the kitchen. The food was almost cooked, so he sat down and started to talk about the comments his lab report had received. Renji and Momo were mostly listening.

“You are awfully quiet,” Izuru observed after a while.

Momo nodded. “Renji has something he needs to tell you.”

“Yeah?” Izuru said, his head slightly tilted. 

It was Renji’s turn to nod, and he started the explanation anew. The second round was easier than the first. The story was more logical, and the timeline held better. Renji was feeling confident and calm. No fear, no agitation – he was merely stating facts.

Like Momo, Izuru listened without interrupting. Like Momo’s, his face was serious and more than slightly confused. His mouth was practically hanging open and he occasionally looked at Momo instead of Renji.

Momo shook her head. Izuru closed his mouth and leaned forward.

“Wow,” he said when Renji finished. “This is… seriously fucked up.”

“Yeah,” Renji replied, with a nod. “I have no idea what to do. I’m afraid we’ll all end up like Kaname.”

Izuru scratched his forehead. “I think we should take some time to think this through. Like, until tomorrow. You should probably stay for the night. We can think this thoroughly through tomorrow.” 

Renji felt his brows begin to knot. “We have lectures tomorrow. The second part of the lab course is about to start.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want to attend?”

“I don’t,” Renji admitted. “But I think we should. Maybe. So that we don’t start to behave strangely and draw attention.”

“Mm, ok.” Izuru scratched his forehead again. “Maybe we should speak after the lectures, then? Are you going to stay for the night?”

Renji nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. I don’t think any of us should be alone right now. Shuhei should come here, too, right when he can. Do you think he’s finished working? I don’t want to explain any of this over the phone.”

Momo and Izuru exchanged a look.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Momo finally said. “I’ll call him right now. He’s probably waiting to hear from us anyway.” 

Renji was unsure about if he wanted to make the call himself, or if it was better if Momo made it. The police were maybe listening his calls, but then again, Momo might say something stupid.

He decided on a compromise. 

“Just put it on the speaker.”

Momo agreed and took out her phone to make the call.

Renji listened the ringback tone long enough to start worrying Shuhei wouldn’t pick up. He did, after a while, but there was a strange sound in the background, even weirder than the one Shuhei had said to be a printer. This was louder, almost rhythmic but slightly uneven, and accompanied with something that sounded like a motor.

“Yeah?” Shuhei’s tone indicated he was pretty much yelling to make himself heard. “Did you get ahold of Renji?” 

“He’s in here,” Momo confirmed. “He’d like to see you. Can you come? Where are you?”

“Sorry, I’m on a speed boat, we are going to the mainland. Is he ok?”

So that was the noise, the speedboat motor and the boat hitting the water, but otherwise, Renji couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was shit news, and now it was up to him to stop Momo for making things worse.

He leaned closer to speak to the phone. “Everything’s fine. Who are you with? Why are you going?”

The line was quiet for a second, spare the background noise. Momo explained briefly the call was on speaker.

“Oh,” Shuhei recovered. “I’m with Tetsuzaemon and Lisa. The police asked if we could come to talk about Kaname.”

Renji swore in his mind. The shit just kept getting deeper, stickier and stinkier.

He should have called earlier. They were at the sea now – he could do nothing, there was nothing he could do, so he focused on not making them worse.

“Ok,” he said to the phone, and made faces to Momo to communicate he wanted the call ended ASAP. “It’s nothing important, just call us when you came back.”

After a brief goodbye, Momo ended the call.

“I’m sure he’s going to be ok. He has company and all,” she said using her most reassuring voice 

For the first time in his life, Renji felt a sudden urge to punch her. It was the stress, he thought, and tried his best to calm down. 

“Let’s go get the mattress right now,” Izuru said and stood up. “Then there’s the food.”

Unsure if Izuru had realized his anger, Renji nodded.

“I’ll be waiting in here,” Momo piped in.

The mattress was stored in the cellar level, where each apartment had a small, lockable space. Izuru’s and Momo’s storage unit wasn’t the last one, but it was quite far from the door. That meant Renji and Izuru had to walk past quite a few storage units, some of them empty and some messy, full of places to hide.

The chicken wire walls of the units were easy to see through. Renji didn’t mind the empty units. It was the full ones, the messy ones that made him nervous, and Izuru didn’t seem to take any precautions. The sense of dread came back to Renji in waves, each wave rising his fear and making him feel more tired. The burden of keeping it all together was his alone to carry. Again.  
  
“Hmm,” Izuru said, when they reached the storage unit, “I don’t see the mattress. Help me to get this stuff out.”

Renji nodded. Izuru opened the lock and the door and started to pass the things to Renji to pile onto the corridor, out of way. There were a couple boxes labelled as winter clothes, and a couple winter jackets. A well-used carpet, and a sleeping bag. Two pairs of skates. Three huge bags of foam peanuts and an empty thermos box.

“I think we should see it by now,” Renji pointed out. They were trying to find a damn _mattress_ ¸ it wasn’t like it was tiny enough to be easily lost.

“You know, I think you are right,” Izuru said. “It must be upstairs. I’ll call Momo and ask her to check.”

The mattress was quickly found. With Renji’s help, Izuru put everything back to its place, and they took the stairs back to the apartment. They ate, mostly in silence, and played cards afterwards. Renji couldn’t focus on the game, but won a few hands anyway. Momo and Izuru weren’t too focused either, he thought, and wanted to ask why they weren’t discussing their strategy when they clearly had time to do so. He found that he couldn’t, and lost the next four hands.


	17. Chapter 17

The air conditioning was broken. The thermostat was a goner, or that’s what it said on the classroom door, only with fancier words. That was why the whole thing was running on half.

Why on half and not full, Renji couldn’t fathom. The room was about as hot as Hell.

Some of the students were complaining about the heat, and others were chatting about their lab work reports.

Nanao was nowhere to be seen. The big clock on the wall showed it was still 10 minutes until the lecture was supposed to start, but Renji was feeling extremely nervous. He feared Nanao had ended up like Kaname.

The minute hand jumped. It always jumped two minutes at a time. That meant it was only 8 minutes before the lecture was supposed to start.

It was only slightly more than 5 minutes.

Izuru and Momo were sitting in their customary seats, one row ahead of Renji. They were behaving like Renji hadn’t told them anything of importance.

Did they even remember? Or were they just really good at acting normal?

Before the next two minutes passed, Nanao arrived. She walked straight to her usual seat without as much as a glance at Renji. He thought she looked worried, but she wasn’t an easy person to read.

Renji stood up and started to walk towards the front of the classroom. He could feel Momo’s and Izuru’s stares at his back, and almost fell down the stairs.

He had always hated the classroom stairs. They were so wide he had to take an extra step on each, which resulted in him stepping up or down with the same leg every time. 

He didn’t ask permission to sit next to Nanao, but she gave him a nod as a hello.

“Why did you stab me with the compass?” Renji asked in hushed enough voice to keep the discussion private.

In his opinion, Nanao still looked more worried than surprised. Her voice was as hushed as his. “I didn’t stab anyone. You needed to focus better. The first report was due yesterday, by the way.”

Renji wasn’t fooled for a second into thinking that Nanao was worried about the report. She had probably handed it in and written his name on it, or maybe left his name off entirely. He didn’t know. He didn’t care if the lecturer was using their report to wipe his ass with.

“What does it do? The compass?” he continued with the main topic.

“It’s good for drawing. Works miracles for circles.”

“No one stabs someone with a compass just to get some attention.”

“Stop acting stupid. No one was stabbed with anything.”

Stonewalling, Renji thought. Be that way. He had the perfect workaround.

“I’m not acting stupid,” he said out loud, and thought Nanao’s thoughts.

Or that was what he tried to do – he felt like his mind hit a stone wall, and not at walking speed.

It was seriously unpleasant. Dizzying, too. And _shit_ , he shouldn’t have done that. If and when they _felt_ when the items were used, it was safe to assume the consultant did as well.

Nanao’s worry changed to obvious unhappiness. “Why are you so fixated with it?”

“When you stabbed me, I felt like I could solve any problem that came to me, or know anything I wanted to. Like I just had to remember who killed Kennedy, or how big the universe is, or whatever the fuck I wanted to know.”

Nanao didn’t answer. Renji considered thinking her thoughts again, but decided against it. He wasn’t sure he could deal with hitting the wall again. He’d have to ask her how she shielded her thought so perfectly. But not now.

“It’s not your compass I’m after,” he said, lowering his voice even further. “Someone might be after it, though, a guy with dark hair and glasses. Fiddles with a Rubik’s cube a lot and works with slash-or for the police, so I think you should be extra careful. But me, I’m just trying to keep my head above the water. I want to find a girl I used to know.”

“And you think my compass could help you with it somehow?”

Nanao chewed on one of her nails. Renji had never seen her biting her nails before.

He gave a quick glance at the clock. The lecturer would come in any second now. “I just think you aren’t telling me everything you know.”

Nanao made a sound somewhere between a cough and clearing her throat. When she spoke, her voice was louder than before. “Would it be ok for you to work on the report after the lecture? We really have to finish with it, or we’ll get kicked out of the course.”

Renji stopped himself in time from telling her what she should do with the report. The meeting obviously wasn’t about the report.

“’kay, I guess,” he said instead. “I kind of thought you had it covered?”

Nanao took a piece of nail out of her mouth and looked at it in mild disgust. 

“Yeah, well,” she said, shrugging. “Let’s talk about it later. We are about to start.”

‘We’ in this case referred to everyone in the room. The lecturer had just fast-walked in and was doing his best to set the computer up.

It didn’t seem to be going well. The poor man was late, and his shirt was either extremely sweaty or showered in.

Not wanting to cause a scene, and suspecting that he’d cause one if he continued to bother Nanao, Renji returned to his seat.

Damn, how he hated the steps. They lacked any and all symmetry, everyone having to step on each step up or down with the same leg.

“I was just asking about the report,” he explained to Momo and Izuru after sitting down. Neither of them asked, and neither looked like they believed him.

The lecturer rinsed his face in a sink at the corner. He managed to drop an extremely wet sponge on his pants in the process.

This guy, Renji thought, feeling strangely disconnected from himself and the whole situation, was lucky that the sponge hadn’t landed on his crotch. The wet spot it left behind would have made him look like had pissed his pants. Now it would just leave behind a pale spot. Because there was chalk dust in the sponge.

The video projector was powering up slowly. The lecturer dried off his face but didn’t bother with his pants.

“I apologize for being late,” he said, not sounding at all like himself, the confident guy who gave shit to the students if they skipped corners with formatting. “I was delayed by some administrative business. Wow, it’s hot in here today. Well, let’s get started, it won’t be getting any better…

“What I have in here,” the lecturer continued and waved a pile of paper, “is the reports you guys sent me. I haven’t checked all of them, as many arrived just yesterday, but I can already tell my spider sense was 100% correct on one thing. Can you guess what it was, redheaded gentleman at the back?”

Renji stared the lecturer for a second. The words were there, but the tone was like the guy’s clothes. A fucking mess.

“Mm, yeah” he answered anyway. “I guess there were more folks who didn’t follow the instructions than those who did, and that you are pretty damn fed up with fixing the page numbering and margins, and a lot of unproductive work could have been avoided if everyone just fucking bothered with reading the instructions.”

“The redheaded gentleman at the back is correct. I couldn’t have put it better myself.” 

The lecturer dropped the report pile on the table. Renji turned his eyes to the ceiling. The lights were on, of course. Tiny bright halogen spots. Or maybe they were LEDs. The paneling around them was grey and full of tiny holes.

“One would think,” the lecturer continued, his tone slowly getting hold of the situation, “that it would be easier to make three-year-old kids to follow the instructions. What’s the difficult part, huh? It’s no more than a couple of pages. Based on this, you guys aren’t in uni; based on this you can’t even read!”

The lecturer went on. The lights were kind of pretty, Renji thought. A lot like stars, only closer and brighter, and in different formations.

He was familiar with the lecturer’s speech already. He didn’t have to see the faces of the younger students to know that the more sensitive ones were horrified to be yelled at.

It was an effective speech, though. It had greatly contributed to freshman-Renji’s unwise decision to travel to the mainland to do stupid shit, but afterwards he had always made sure he was using the correct formatting. 

The next topic was the importance of paying attention to units. For a brief while, Renji felt like it was all just a dream. That Gin was still alive, somewhere, and Rangiku was simply napping at her apartment.

He didn’t want it to be a dream, though. He was happy he had climbed on the locker room roof. If he hadn’t, they wouldn’t be in this mess, but he’d still be thinking Rukia was dead.

No, strike that. They’d still be in the same exact mess, they just wouldn’t know it. Kaname would have hung with Shuhei anyway. Momo’s statue had nothing to do with Renji in the first place.

The lecturer was interrupted by a loud knock at the front door, which was fairly unusual – the students arriving late usually just sneaked in using the back door, and certainly didn’t announce themselves by knocking.

Fuck.

This was it for him.

Whoever was knocking didn’t wait for a reply. Renji could only stare when Kaya the Cop waltzed in, followed by the grey-eyed consultant and four officers he had never seen before. 

If they had seen him, even followed him, that was another question.

There was a brief uproar in the room, but Renji wasn’t listening to his fellow students. He was focusing on Kaya, who walked to the lecturer and spoke with him.

The microphone was on mute. Renji tried to read their lips but couldn’t do so well enough to understand the words, and Kaya was way too far away for him to think her thoughts. But he didn’t have to manage either to know that the lecturer wasn’t surprised by the visit.

He had been set up.

The microphone crackled when Kaya took it. She didn’t clip it on, but held it close to her face to speak.

“Silence, please,” she started. The classroom obliged.

“As you undoubtedly know, a crime resulting in a death of a man took place on the island not that long ago. We have a reason to believe that in this room, there is a person who has knowledge of the case. I stress that he is not a suspect. I repeat that, he is not a suspect, we only with to speak to you. Could you please identify yourself?”

Noise erupted, but Renji hardly heard it from the ringing in his ears. He didn’t believe Kaya for a mouldy, rotten second. The bitch had his contact info, for starters, so what the hell was going on? 

“Silence, please,” Kaya repeated.

When Renji did nothing to give himself up, the police started to slowly climb up the stairs. Kaya and the consultant took the stairs he was sitting closer to, two officers took the other aisle. The two remaining cops stood at the front, doing seemingly nothing.

Neither Momo nor Izuru gave any visible or audible reaction. Renji couldn’t see their faces and hoped they were just being as discreet as they possibly could.

He couldn’t let himself get caught. It was starting to seem like a fight or flight situation.

There was no getting past Kaya and the consultant, but no one was at the back door.

He jumped up and ran. It was just a few steps before he reached the door.

It didn’t open. He pulled it, pushed it, pressed the handle, but the door remained closed. 

It was locked, Renji realized. From the outside.

No flight, then.

Turning to face Kaya and the consultant, he took the knife out and raised it. It was not an especially good stance, he knew. His hands were shaking. He had no idea what he was doing, martial arts-wise. He felt the students staring at him, but didn’t let his eyes wander from Kaya and the consultant.

“Renji, calm down.”

It was the consultant, who sounded like he was… bored to the extreme? 

“No one is going to hurt you. We just need to clarify some things.”

There was nothing to say, so Renji said nothing.

“Just drop the knife and we’ll get along fine,” the consultant continued and started to walk towards him. Kaya followed.

There was no gun to be seen. Maybe they didn’t think they’d need one.

Maybe they had something better.

“Don’t,” Renji warned, but the consultant didn’t act like he even heard him. The guy just kept walking, hands raised to chest-level, palms out.

“Don’t,” Renji repeated and waved the knife, but was not met with any reaction.

Quite literally cornered, Renji took a swipe at the consultant.

The guy grabbed his arm, fast a snake and strong as a bear. The knife hit the consultant with enough force to cut through the fabric of his sleeve and draw blood before clattering on the floor.

The actual sound of clattering wasn’t heard, though. Momo screamed like she had screamed when she had seen Gin dead.

Momo. 

And Izuru, and Nanao.

Renji was cornered, but not alone.

“He’s not a cop!” he yelled as loud as he could. “He wants me dead because I can think your thoughts, I can prove it, it’s my earphones! They can’t even be broken, just look!”

Perhaps the first time in the school’s history everyone in the room was fully focused on what was going on. Good, they needed to see.

Renji used his free hand to rip the earphones off his person. He dropped them, and stepped on them.

The plastic made a crunching sound. Renji felt the earphones giving in under his weight. The sensation of dread fell on him.

It couldn’t be real, but it was. 

The mess of plastic and wire and the floor, and the blood-stained knife not too far from it. The consultant’s grip on his arm.

And he had just, somehow, been able to destroy the earphones.

There was no reading anyone’s thoughts, not anymore. He should have done so earlier. Then he’d know what the fuck was going on.

Renji didn’t have much time to dwell on his mistakes. The consultant kicked his feet under him and held him down. Kaya cuffed his hands and informed him that he was under arrest.

There was speech. His rights, probably.

So much for not getting arrested.

To be fair, drawing the knife might have contributed the decision.

It was impressively effective, Renji thought later on, but at the time he was focused on kicking and screaming. The cuffs cut into his wrists badly enough to break skin. There was the strangest sensation of tearing in his shoulder, but no pain to speak of.

Someone was repeating his name. It was a woman’s voice.

Rukia’s?

He quieted down to hear her better, and was immediately disappointed. It wasn’t Rukia who was speaking, it was Kaya. She was trying to tell him to calm down.

He did remain still and quiet, lying on the classroom floor, but not to please Kaya or the consultant. It simply didn’t make sense to fight against the cuffs and the cops. He’d wait for the right moment, and then he’d run like hell.

He saw shoes. The consultant had an expensive-looking pair that matched his suit. Kaya and the other officers wore working boots. Then there was the bloodied knife, and the broken earphones.

The headband was a mess. It was bent to hell and had snapped in two. One of the earcups was in pieces and the cushion had fallen off. The electronics were visible.

Every piece of broken plastic, every piece of exposed wiring looked perfectly ordinary.

Renji didn’t know if he had stopped hearing properly or if the room was dead silent.

Turned out the room was just silent. Renji could heard the officers moving when they lifted him up. He considered briefly going all limp, just to make their work more difficult.

Kaya spoke into her radio and opened the door soon after that. The two officers started to walk Renji out.

“He didn’t do anything bad!”

It was Momo. Her voice was sharp, angrier than Renji had ever heard it.

Renji tried to turn to see her, but the officers held him too tight. He saw the consultant, though, who nodded. 

“As you may notice, miss, we were not planning on making an arrest. He is not a suspect on the murder. But as you also may notice, we were experiencing some difficulties. Do not worry. We are here only in assisting capacity.”

Momo didn’t reply, but the edge in her voice gave Renji new hope. The door was open; if he’d get loose, he’d make a run for it.

He leaped forward.

The result left room for improvement. The officers held him tight, and this time there was _pain_. It seared through his shoulder, and for a second, he was the boy who took a nasty fall when roll-skating.

When he came to properly, the five of them (the two officers, Kaya, the consultant and Renji himself) were out of the room. The consultant closed the door and the officers started to run through his pockets.

Their main findings were a lighter, an almost empty strip of nicotine tablets and greyish lint that had been a piece of paper more than a couple washes ago.

The officers took Renji out of the main doors. He complied, still waiting for his moment to run.

When out in the sun, he was surprised to see an ambulance.

Surely they hadn’t gotten the thing in there just minutes after he had cut the consultant?

Neither of the first responders was Isane, Joben’s mom who didn’t have any kids. Both were men and looked like they had been pumping iron with Tetsuzaemon for the last couple of years.

“He seems pretty calm,” one of them observed, the uglier. 

Neither of them were ugly, in all honesty. Renji just despised them from the start. He was also starting to realize it wasn’t the consultant who was the patient. It was him.

“True, but he is unpredictable.” That was one of the police officers (again, the uglier one). “He tried to stab Kuchiki, managed to draw blood actually, and tried to run a couple times. I think he hurt his shoulder in the process, too.”

“Restraints, then?”

“That’s for you to decide, but it’s a long drive. We got the dangerous items off him, but I’m not sure it’d be safe to transport him unrestrained.”

The man nodded and gave Renji a stern look. “You aren’t going to try anything funny if I give you a pill to swallow, are you?”

“I might.”

Renji wanted to kick himself immediately after letting the two words escaped. Damn his mouth, getting all honest when it counted for real!

“Injection it is, then.”

He was helped into the ambulance and held down while the nurse gave him the injection. He didn’t move, or didn’t see the needle, but the liquid felt cold. The whole muscle felt cold soon after, like he had been injected with ice water. Maybe some acid mixed with it. And not the good kind of acid.

Although, you never knew.

Well, shit. It had hit the fan and rained down in record time. 

Shit, that was.

At least maybe he would learn what had happened to Kaname. And maybe Rukia, too, if he was real lucky.

He never was. Lucky, that was. Except the kind that had un- in it. Unlucky.

Was he starting to feel injection this fast, or was the pain in his shoulder muddling his thoughts?

Or was it something the consultant was doing? The bastard was nowhere to be seen.

He let the first responder strap him down. Arms and legs both, and then some strange safety belt. Then the car started to move.

Soon enough he knew for sure he was feeling the injection. He felt heavy and sleepy, but not in a bad way. It was like a woolen blanket over his head, or like diving in a tub full of warm water with his eyes open. The ripples of water would mess up the lights and shapes, painting everything anew. Everything would look like in one of those paintings with melting clocks and weird giraffes, or were the thin-legged creatures in them camels or elephants?

Diving came as close to real flying as a human being ever could.

The ambulance drove to the shore. Renji could tell it by the sounds of seagulls. No place was as full of seagulls as the docks.

Except maybe landfills. One of the documentaries he had watched with Shuhei had been about birds well-adapted to the urban world. Seagulls found all kinds of yummy things from landfills. Crows had figured out they could drop nuts on pedestrian crossings for the nuts to be run over by multi-ton nutcrackers. The fuckers even knew to wait for the green light to collect the goods without having to risk becoming pancake-shaped.

Meanwhile, he had stepped on his own earphones and gotten them broken. The stupidity of that was mind-baffling. A crow would have flown to safety while dropping a nut on Kaya and taking a shit on the consultant.

A crow was smart. Renji, on the other hand, was pretty fucking dumb.

After letting the birds be birds, Renji wondered briefly if the driver planned on driving the ambulance to the sea in order to let him drown.

Somehow, it didn’t seem like the most probable scenario.

Not long after, two familiar metallic clanks told him the that the car was being driven onto a ferry, or more likely onto a water taxi. It was way too early for the ferry be leaving.

Was it Old Captain Haddock who was steering the thing? Did he know, or guess, who was in the ambulance?

Probably not.

Renji’s shins itched something fierce but with the restraints on, there was no scratching them.

The sea was quite calm, but the small boat rocked slightly. The rocking was starting to make him slightly nauseous and a lot sleepier, or maybe that was the injection. The darkness that was sleep crept on him slowly.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so we are now almost done! Only one more chapter after this and it actually is done.

Renji had a room of his own. It was a lot like the room he used to have in high school, during that last semester he had lived in the dorms. The room was small, comfortably fitting in only a bed and a desk. There were three cupboards, all embedded in the wall. Two of them, Renji used for clothes, one for other personal belongings.

Soon after arriving, Renji received most of his clothes in the same cardboard box someone had used to mail them. The someone was presumably Momo, Izuru or Shuhei, or all the above, but the box didn’t specify. There was nothing in the box, except the clothes. 

Some of Renji’s personal belonging arrived a couple days later in a similar box. He ransacked the box multiple times, trying to find Rangiku’s post card, or a note, or anything of interest.

He found a flat fly and an old library receipt, both of which fell from between the pages of his mathematics textbook. He threw them (the fly and the receipt, not the book) into the trash, crammed most of the stuff back in the box and let the box rot in the cupboard from that point on.

It surprised him to see how few important things he owned, cookware and such not included.

There wasn’t much need for his cookware in the hospital. The food came from the central kitchen and was served in the South Wing lunchroom. The food wasn’t bad at all, even desserts were oftentimes served, and he was allowed to take as much or as little as he wanted to.

Some residents had their own ready-made plates for whatever reasons, but Renji liked to eat from the same line with the others. At first, when the food was served in his room, he had been suspicious about whether it was safe to eat. 

The hunger had won, eventually, and the food had proved safe.

He had lived. Everyone had lived, as far as he knew. There was no news about Kaname, but Renji hadn’t had any contact with anyone from the School Island, so he assumed no news was good news.

He was even informed that he avoided all criminal charges on the merit of being viewed as non compos mentis, not criminally responsible. He was slapped with more involuntary psychiatric care, but at that point, he had seen it coming. So no real losses there.

Everything seemed to be sorting out relatively nicely, all things considered. Or, that was what he kept telling himself. The degree of success varied day by day, if not hour by hour.

He missed Rukia, though. And Momo’s betrayal stung real bad. It had to be Momo, Renji had figured, who had tipped the authorities. She was the only one with a proper chance.

To make it worse, Izuru had helped her. Knowingly and willingly, Renji suspected, by dragging him downstairs and giving Momo enough time to make the call. 

But then again, what did he know? Why would the cops wait till the day and come to school, of all possible places, to get him?

That mystery wasn’t going to solve itself, but day by day Renji felt his interest in it dwindling. He had bigger problems to deal with, starting with the thing folks liked to call reality.

It was getting difficult to know what was real and what was not. Some of it, now, felt so utterly ridiculous, like how scared he had been about getting poisoned during the first days in the hospital. But there was other stuff that rang true, no matter how you looked at it, or even asked about it. Gin had died, Rukia had gone missing, and he had fucking _predicted_ something bad was about to happen to Kaname.

His mind had crafted detailed, but absurd explanations for events that, while unfortunate and extremely tragic, were unconnected. That was what his therapy sessions boiled down to, anyway.

More words were used, of course. A metric fuck-ton more words, and a lot of hours in saying them. Most of the words had been said in the newer part of the hospital, called North Wing, where the doctors and most of the hospital equipment were. Although, if you were to nitpick, North Wing was probably the main building for the South and East Wings.

There were twenty or so patients living in the South Wing. After a while, Renji had been allowed to mingle with them freely. Some of them were weird in a way that unnerved him, but most were ok. Occasionally he spent time with the other patients, often by watching tv or playing and old PlayStation console.

He was getting really good at FIFA.

Something lacked in the days, though, that something that made him feel like he wanted to socialise. The daily routines took a huge chunk of his time. Life was pretty boring, uneventful even, but the meds made him tired, and between sleeping, meals, group activities and occasional therapy or doctor visits, there wasn’t too much time to kill. 

On some days, he liked the routine. He was just allowed to be, to exist without having to worry about the earphones, food that tasted too bad to eat, the consultant and all that shit. He’d sleep, eat, and make a mollusc shell out of clay in art activity. Not because he cared about molluscs much in one way or another, but because he wasn’t nearly as good with clay than he was with FIFA, and he’d ended up being almost proud of how good the mollusc looked.

On other days, he felt so bored he thought he’d lose it for real. And seriously, a mollusc, what the hell had he been thinking?

On those days he missed his life on the School Island. He missed Shuhei’s ridiculous documentaries, and he missed Momo and Izuru, despite what they had done.

Surely they had been trying to do the right thing. Momo always tried to do the right thing, and somehow sucked Izuru into the sickening good-doing what she lived for. 

In the retrospect, it probably had been for the best.

Then something would change in his mind again, for no obvious reason, and he’d be thinking he was content with staying in the hospital. 

But whichever way his feelings were, two thing he longed for: Rukia, and thinking other people’s thoughts. He had lost the skill when he had broken the earphones, and he supposed that, despite his best efforts, he hadn’t been even close to finding her.

To sum it up, life was as dull as the late autumn weather.

Renji couldn’t even tell when the heat wave had made room for the weather more appropriate for the season. The South Wing had an excellent air conditioning, so the building was rarely too hot or too cold. He had simply looked out one day and realized it was cloudy and rainy. 

That had felt weird. It wasn’t that he had to stay indoors all the time, and he went to the North Wing constantly. He simply hadn’t noticed the change. Maybe even the first snow had already come and gone.

It wasn’t only the weather patterns that slipped from his mind. Had he already brushed his teeth? Where had he put the half-eaten sandwich? Had he already written in the diary his doctor in the North Wing wanted him to keep?

It was the meds, he was sure of that. He kept noticing side effects. His hands shook like never before. His pants had ‘mysteriously’ shrunken. The uppermost button didn’t close any more. At one point he had gained fast enough to get stretchmarks, some on which had ruined his tattoos. The affected lines were blurred and distorted, and fixing them would be a pain – he’d have to make every line just a little bit thicker to hide the damage. Every damn line that had suffered, and the neighbouring lines, and the same lines at the other side of his body, too. For symmetry.

The doctor said he shouldn’t stress over the side effects too much. After all, Renji had come to the hospital to find the meds he responded well to. It was an ongoing process, and if his body didn’t adjust, they’d change things up. He just needed to give it a bit more time.

Renji took out two things of this. 

One: easy for her to say, it wasn’t her hide to be inked, or her hands that were good mainly for faking seismogram data – you’d just pull a paper under a pen he was holding and submit the results to National fucking Geographic.

Two: he hadn’t come to the hospital to do anything, he had been brought in against his will. 

And rightly so, a part of his brain liked to pipe in every time he got to point two.

He was growing increasingly uncertain if that was the treacherous part of his brain, or the non-treacherous part.

Another thing the doctor often told Renji was that he was allowed to see people close to him, family and friends alike, and that it was important to attend the group activities.

He kept refusing to meet anyone he knew from before. Even when he missed the School Island and his old life, and was told that his friends had asked after him, he stayed strong. It just felt wrong, to drag Shuhei, Izuru and Momo into his shit. Again.

Group activities or therapy, instead, he didn’t mind. Oftentimes they painted or made handcrafts, or took walks in the woods close by. It was something to do and therefore a positive thing, although Renji didn’t consider himself skilled in most of what they did. He didn’t understand how painting and then discussing how it made him feel was supposed to help him, either.

Although he had to admit, he was learning a lot ways to verbally express mild frustration. The damn paint or ink or clay just fucking refused to do what he wanted it to. 

But that probably wasn’t the point.

The longer Renji lived in the South Wing, more it started to feel like a home. Even the painting was something to take his thought away from his real problems, and focus them onto small, artificial problems, like trying to learn how to shade an apple correctly. Shading apples and evolving from a mollusc to a salamander in clay projects were something real in the world that he didn’t always know what was and what was not.

* * *

It was 20 days till Christmas. Renji knew this because he had bought a My Little Pony advent calendar on a previous trip to the town as a joke, and was now greeted by Rainbow Dash’s grin and a piece of milk chocolate every morning.

It felt nice, a lot nicer than Renji had expected. A piece of chocolate before breakfast generally hit the spot, and Rainbow Dash brought some color to the otherwise boring room. An unexpected bonus was his therapist had been happy to hear about it. He failed to see how a stupid advent calendar and candy before the day’s most important meal had anything to do with getting better, but he played along. 

He wasn’t playing along, not really. It was genuinely nice to have someone to talk to about whatever shit he wanted to, even if the someone got paid for it.

As long as the talking wasn’t about clay or paint. He was in a _hospital_ , not in a fucking art school.

The 20th day before Christmas dragged on uneventful enough to make Renji look forward to his ‘job’. Like many of the patients in South Wing, he had been handed a small everyday responsibility. He had landed a task of helping the cleaning ladies two times in a week, a couple hours at a time, usually after lunch. He would have preferred something that took him outside, like raking or mowing the lawn or shovelling snow. The leaves, however, were already gone and the ground was still grey, so there wasn’t much to do outdoors.

Helping out wasn’t hard work by any means, as it was more about rehabilitation than getting the work done. Still, some of the patients struggled with their tasks. Social anxiety or whatever other things they had working against them stopped them simply from cracking their knuckles and saying, so, let’s get this shit done before it’s time for coffee.

Renji pitied that kind of patients sometimes, but couldn’t shake the weird feeling that he was pitied back more often than not.

He didn’t bother mulling over it much. He simply showed up when he was asked to, and did what he was asked to do. It was easy.

Today, he had been informed, they’d be washing windows. Renji was under the impression it was time for a proper Christmas Cleaning or Holiday Hoo-hah or some shit along the lines. 

He honestly didn’t care one way or another. The last time he had washed a window was when he had moved out from the dorms after finishing high school, but work was work, and he didn’t mind it. Doing things was satisfying in its own way. No amount of talk could ever measure up.

And he was good at reaching things, which was useful in cleaning.

This time, the door was opened by a young woman, Miki. Her husband had recently gone back to school, and she was working part time to support her family financially. She was usually fun and even witty.

At the moment, she was also surprised.

“Oh, hi,” she said, recovered. “No one told you, huh?”

“Told me what? I guess not.”

Miki nodded. “Mrs. Imai isn’t working today. She pulled her back yesterday, so she’s on sick leave. We weren’t expecting you.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Renji said, and meant it. Mrs. Imai was a nice older woman, the one with whom he usually worked. She tended to talk his ear off, but she was never weird in his company, and she actually expected him to do whatever he was told to do.

In short, treated him like a normal person.

“Is that Renji?” one of cleaning ladies half-yelled from her seat further away.

“Yeah,” Renji half-yelled back.

“Please come in. We have cupcakes.”

Miki made room for Renji to walk in, and he did.

The cleaning lady who had invited him in, Mrs. Shinobu, gestured towards a coffee table and the cupcakes. Renji had just eaten lunch, but didn’t mind an extra round of dessert and took one.

“Like Miki said,” Shinobu explained, “Mariko is on sick leave. She sent me an e-mail earlier, said that she doesn’t know yet if it’s just a pulled muscle or if there is more damage. So we don’t know when she’ll be back at work, and I was thinking that if you and the folks at the South Wing don’t have anything against it, it would be great if you could continue to help us. We got a girl to fill in from the substitute pool but she… isn’t very experienced, and I think she could use some help.”

Miki giggled. “Mrs. Shinobu is being polite. Eriko, the new girl that is, seems really nice but she works like she’s holding a wipe for the first time in her life.”

Mrs. Shinobu gave an Evil Eye to Miki, who didn’t seem to care. Mrs. Shinobu was strictly against badmouthing anyone.

Renji swallowed a mouthful of cupcake. “That’s cool for me. I’ll just finish this off,” he slightly lifted the half-eaten cupcake, “and change my clothes real fast.”

“Thank you. She was washing the windows in X-ray waiting room a minute ago. I’m sure you’ll find her close by. Do you know the place?”

“More or less. I’ll ask around. Thanks for the cupcake!”

Mrs. Shinobu just nodded. Renji stuffed rest of the cupcake into his mouth and heeded for the changing room. 

Not long after he walked East Wing corridors and tried to figure his way to the right place. Had the place been empty, he’d be having difficulties, but now, when he couldn’t find the correct guide signs, he just asked the directions. The hospital was a large complex, but Renji had spent enough time in it to have some idea about where stuff was.

The x-ray waiting room was more of a lobby with ten or so chairs and a tiny magazine rag full of extremely boring reading. One of the chairs was occupied by an elderly man, another by a woman and a child, whose face was red and puffy with recent crying. At the moment, the child was calm, though, busy with a lollipop.

The windows were a disaster, probably dirtier than they had been before washing. Stripes of water stained them, and small rivers ran from their corners. The floor was full of splashes. Even the sign cautioning of the wet floor looked sloppy. Renji wasn’t even sure how you could even put it on sloppily; you just opened it, and then it stood there. No room left for poor workmanship, but Eriko had managed that.

Renji followed the water to Eriko. She was just behind a corner, standing on a ladder to reach the top of the window. The sponge on the squeegee was way too wet, explaining the inland sea she was creating on the floor.

Renji suddenly didn’t give a shit about the water or the cleanliness of the windows. His full attention focused on the girl, her shiny black hair and petite body, and the rubber gloves way too big for her tiny hands.

It was absolutely one of those moments Renji didn’t know if what he was seeing was real or not.

He didn’t even know if he was awake or dreaming. 

“Rukia?” 

The girl washing the windows stopped in mid-strike. She was still for a second, or maybe a lot longer, or maybe not at all. Then she turned to face Renji.

Her eyes were just as purple as Renji remembered.

“Nice to see you,” he greeted her.

The words sounded weird even to him. Empty. Like he didn’t know what he was doing, which, in truth, was the case. 

After being repeatedly told she didn’t exist, and that Renji’s mind had simply given her face to a stranger, he didn’t even know how to feel about seeing her again.

His brain opted into feeling nothing.

It was an ordinary thing, an everyday thing. Like seeing a familiar face when changing a few words with an old acquaintance after stuffing a bag of discount bagels into one’s shopping cart or exchanging a few words with a neighbour while checking your mailbox.

“Oh, hi,” the girl said, and took a pause to give him a wide but obviously very fake smile. It looked like her face was cramping. “You must be confusing me with someone else. My name is Eriko Kumamoto. You are Renji, right? The cleaning ladies mentioned you.”

Renji stopped himself in time from saying that he knew who he was seeing. 

Instead, he nodded. “They said you’d be here and that you could use some help.”

Rukia nodded and dropped the squeegee into the bucket. The inland sea swallowed a few coastal cities. She then hopped down from the ladder and gave Renji a good look.

“I could. Let’s find you some supplies.”

She took off down the hallway, towards what Renji could only guess would turn out to be a broom closet. He followed, a step and a half behind her, expecting that she’d start explaining at any moment.

Any moment now.

It was a broom closet she was searching for. She opened the door and walked in. Renji followed her into the closet, which was way too small for two people to stand comfortably. 

“You’ll need a bucket. And a mop, I think,” Rukia said, trying and failing to reach the microfiber floorcloths. Renji took one and handed it to her.

“Thanks. I don’t get why they store this shit so stupidly high up.”

“You are welcome.” Renji scratched his head, trying to find the words. “But, you know, I know who you are. So, pardon my French, but I really want to know what the fuck is going on.”

“Intervention.” For the first time, Rukia’s face revealed she was feeling something. Worry? “But I don’t want to speak here, in the hospital. I’m… kind of overstepping my boundaries. You can go to town unsupervised, right?”

Renji nodded. “I have to ask permission, but that shouldn’t be an issue.”

Rukia took a mop and a bucket and dumped them in Renji’s arms. “Good. Do you know where the bus station is?”

“Yeah, but it’s a long walk to get there.”

“Just take a bus,” Rukia said. She was speaking really, really fast, and it was starting to make Renji nervous. “The station is the final stop of the line. Can you be there tomorrow, 5 pm? We’ll meet outside.”

“Yeah, if I don’t run into any problem, but--”

“I’ll find you again if you do. I promise. I pinky-fucking-swear it. Till then, keep your mouth shut and wash some windows with Eriko.”


	19. Chapter 19

Renji stared at the street, then at the bus clock, and then at the street. After spending an agonizingly long 24 worrying on things, he still was feeling extremely nervous.

What if he had imagined the whole thing? What if something bad had happened to Rukia after she had left the hospital? What if Eriko was just someone who didn’t know how to clean windows and looked a lot like Renji thought adult Rukia would have looked, had she lived. What if his condition was turning worse and he’d imagined Eriko entirely?

What if he’d be late?

According to the timetable, the bus would reach the station at 4:43 pm, but the minutes were running by and the driver didn’t seem to be in any hurry. The guy was actually _humming_ along to the Christmas carols played by whatever radio station he was listening to. Renji could have done without hearing how life turned around for Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. 

And, factually, the bus was running late. The clock read 4:45, and they were stuck at a red light, albeit the last one before the station. 

Renji rubbed his eyes and tried to see if Rukia was waiting for him. The bus heater was blowing hot air onto his face. It was making his eyes, his whole damn face feel dry as hell.

No Rukia.

Someone had put Christmas lights on the trees around the bus station. It wasn’t dark yet, and the lights were off. Renji could see the black electrical cord connecting the lights. It made him think of spider webs.

“The final stop,” the driver called out and stopped the bus. Renji hopped out and was followed by a young girl and an old man. The child called the man Grandfather.

Renji still couldn’t see Rukia.

It was disappointing. Close to crushing, really, but he reminded himself that despite the delays, he was still, technically, early. She had almost ten minutes to show up before she’d even be late.

The weather was nasty. It was winter weather, all right, but a far cry of what was advertised in the songs selling the joys a one-horse open sleigh ride. The air was heavy with tiny water droplets that fell so slowly they almost counted as fog. The wind was cold, and occasional gusts shook water down from the leafless trees. 

Renji could have walked into the bus station, but he didn’t want to risk it. Rukia had said they’d meet outside, and fuck if he was about to mess it up because he was afraid of some wind and water.

So he sat on a bench close to the bus stops. He did his best to dry the wood off before he sat down, but even so, he could feel water seeping through the layers of his clothing.

He was starting to get cold, and memories of Rukia’s funeral flooded into his mind.

He didn’t even know if the memories were his. They could have been Shuhei’s as well, or maybe he had just imagined them and made himself to believe in them. He had been told that many people, also mentally healthy people, had false memories. 

Accurate or not, his memory brought up images of Renji walking in the graveyard, hand in hand with Izuru. In his free hand he was holding a flower. The stones in the memorial for those lost at sea seemed scary and dark, so massive he felt he’d be crushed under them.

But there was beauty in the memory too, now. It didn’t weigh him down like it had used to.

Renji took a glimpse on the clock. It was officially 5 pm, but Rukia was nowhere to be seen. 

Maybe she was just late, Renji thought, watching birds on the treetops. Crows, or maybe ravens. They were too far away for him to identify, but the dark silhouettes were like holes cut out of the winter-grey sky.

Something spooked the birds when it was three past five. Renji could hear their calls as they flew a couple circles before settling back down.

The last one closed its wings at five past five.

At twelve past, a long-distance bus pulled in to the station. The passengers leaving it seemed busy. Many dragged luggage, or children who were struggling to keep up, but one of the passengers was Rukia.

Renji, unsure about what she wanted to be called, called her fake name and waved his hand. Rukia waved back briefly and started to walk towards him. 

She sat down without as much as hello or an attempt at drying the bench.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” Renji said quietly. He was staring Rukia’s knees, mainly because meeting her eyes was too scary. She was wearing a skirt short enough to show her knees covered in black leggings or stockings or whatever weird girly garments she preferred.

“Yeah, sorry about that. There was an accident in the highway and the bus got delayed. Thank you for waiting, I was starting to think you’d give up before we made it here.”

Renji risked a glance up. “Never. I’m… kinda thick like that, I guess. I’d have been waiting in here all night.”

Rukia wasn’t smiling, but there was something soft around her eyes. She remained quiet, and Renji didn’t know what to say.

They sat in silence for some time. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, exactly, but Renji supposed it could have been a lot worse. He wasn’t feeling anxious, per se, just really unsure in the company of a grown woman he only remembered as a small child, and a woman who had murdered a man in a locker room.

“Would it be ok if I gave you a hug?” he asked after a moment. 

Rukia didn’t seem completely comfortable with it but nodded. “I guess it’s ok, considering how much trouble I caused for you.”

It was a very short hug. Rukia stiffened under his touch, and he let go.

He apologized.

Rukia shook her head and stood up. “Don’t worry about it, I’m just not used to that. Come, we should buy the tickets.”

“Tickets?”

“Bus tickets.”

Her voice was suddenly different. Business-like, like she had kicked her brain into the gear of Getting Shit Done, and that she knew exactly how that shit was gonna get done.

“Don’t worry,” she continued, when Renji was unable to find an intelligent reply. “I’m not planning to kidnap you or murder you or anything like that. I just want a warm private place to speak.”

Renji kept his mouth shut about matters like the privacy of buses. He nodded instead.

“I wasn’t thinking you would. Kidnap me, that is.”

“That’s… actually not a bad start, all things considered. Just follow me now, and play along if need be.”

Rukia started to walk towards the station building. Renji followed her lead, wondering if the ‘all things’ she was referring to had to do with his condition or Gin’s death.

Perhaps both.

Rukia bought two tickets for a bus scheduled to leave soon. The cashier handled the transaction like a robot, not bothering with smiles or eye contact. Renji remembered her vaguely from his time in trying to find Rukia in the town. When they had last met, the cashier had mostly regretted a missed opportunity of becoming a plumber.

“The bus will leave ten minutes late,” she informed them, “we are waiting passengers from another bus arriving late due to traffic. There may be some for your line too.”

Despite the weather, Rukia didn’t linger in the station. The bus driver let them in, though, and seemed like a decent person in the sense that Christmas carols weren’t playing in her bus.

Rukia got their tickets stamped. She walked all the way to the last row before gesturing for Renji to sit down.

He sat.

“Where are we going?” he asked, not being familiar enough with the bus lines to recognize the number.

Rukia sat next to him. “It’s just a drive-around for you. Like I said, I’m overstepping some boundaries, so I didn’t want to hang out in a café or something. This is a good place to speak. Keeps moving, is private, is warm. And not rainy. Sorry, none of this is probably making any sense to you.”

It wasn’t, and just mentioning a café made Renji think of coffee and a nice smoke, despite the fact that he was now officially a non-smoker. The hospital was a smoke-free area, and after weeks on nicotine tablets and patches he had decided to say his final goodbyes to the cancer sticks.

But he still had the cravings of a smoker.

“I was hoping you could help it make sense,” he said and popped a Tic Tac into his mouth.

“That’s a lot to hope for,” she answered, and turned to watch out of the window on the opposite side of the bus. It was showing mostly the concrete element of the bus station building. Its color was dark grey, thanks to the rain.

Renji focused on Rukia instead. She looked younger than she was, being short, thin and not that well-equipped with the breast department. Her face wasn’t helping. It was round, almost child-like. Her skin was so flawless it made Renji want to touch her cheek just to make sure she was real.

The bus started to move. No one else had jumped in.

Rukia turned to look at him. “Are you doing ok?”

“You mean, like, with my head? I guess so. I’m not allowed to live alone but if I had a place to go, relatives or something, I could move in with them.”

Renji was quiet for a second, thinking if he wanted to overshare or not, and decided to go for it. Beating around the bush wasn’t getting him the explanations he wanted.

That didn’t mean the words came out easy. 

“I, uh, kind of tried to stab a guy. It was self-defence, I thought. You maybe know something about it?”

“ _I might_. Do you still think it was? Self-defence, I mean. Are you still thinking you need to defend yourself?”

“Eh.” Renji had to pause again, this time to think about how to reply. “I think I’m undecided. I’m guessing you know I’m on antipsychotics, right? They tell me that much of what I thought happened didn’t happen, that you are dead. Then you showed up. I think there’s a conflict of logic somewhere in here. Am I in danger?”

Rukia shook his head and turned to watch out of the window again. The bus was driving next to an industrial park, and the air conditioning was pushing in fish smell. One of the factories was locally famous for its frozen fish products.

The weather outside had taken a turn towards less rainy but foggier, or maybe the fog was just easier to see in the darkening evening. The bus driver still hadn’t put the radio on, and the background noise of their silence was the humming of the engine and air conditioning.

They had already driven past the industrial complex when Rukia spoke: “More than one thing can be true at the same time. It’s not a conflict of logic.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I’m here, as Rukia and Eriko both. The artifacts, you call them items, they are real. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be on your meds, and it’s not some weird cosmic fate or some crap like that. It’s the earphones. It’s typical, really.”

“Oh?”

Rukia nodded. The view behind Rukia was now fields. The crops had been collected, and the soil was black and wet, but Renji was still focusing on Rukia’s face. It was serious, but there was, again, something soft somewhere around her eyes. Renji wanted to believe it was a hint of smile. She was chewing her lip, like she, too, had to think what to say.

“You never thought much about what was going on in your brain when you were thinking thoughts that weren’t yours?”

Renji heard the softness in her voice. That had to be a hint of a smile.

“It’s not something that you get to do free,” she continued, “As in ‘without side effects.’ The human brain isn’t wired for stuff like that.”

“Makes sense,” Renji admitted, and wanted to kick himself. He had been so focused on the possible threats that something like that hadn’t even crossed his mind. It was stupid, really.

And fuck him if he wasn’t paying the price for that. 

“This probably isn’t much of a comfort,” Rukia told him, “but it could have ended a lot worse for you. Just recently, there was a woman who lost more than five years’ worth of memories. Her mother’s death and funeral, her own wedding, having two children.”

Renji nodded, and thought of Isane and Joben. It had to be her.

“Why didn’t you just come and get the earphones?” he asked instead of focusing on Isane.

The softness vanished. Rukia simply looked sad. 

“It was my mistake. I’m sorry, and even more sorry it’s you who have to pay for it. I dropped the ball. You can be angry with me if you want.

“We didn’t know you had them – I was supposed to get them from Ichimaru, and when that went south, I left. Really fast, for obvious reasons. I knew who you were, of course, but we all were thinking the cops had the earphones. Why wouldn’t they? Brother took the lead, he’d been working with the police earlier, and before shit got sorted out, it was too late to get you out scratch-free, with how much you were using the earphones.”

Renji filed the mysterious ‘Brother’ for further reference. He felt like he understood, in a way. That didn’t mean it was easy to accept he – once again – had fallen thought the cracks. Based on what she was telling him, the smallest change might have saved him from whatever was short-circuiting in his head.

“I’m not angry with you,” he said, focusing his gaze to the view behind Rukia. In a recently turned field a flock of seagulls was scrounging up worms.

He didn’t want to ask. But he felt that he’d regret it later if he didn’t.

“Am I going to be ok? Like for real?”

The sadness didn’t leave Rukia. “Most people recover. But you have to understand that we don’t have a statistic worth shit. The whole point is to prevent this from happening. Just keep your eye on what’s real, take your meds, jump through the whatever loops they make you. That’s your best chance.”

“It’d be helluva easier if any of this made any sense.”

Rukia nodded. “That’s why I’m here. I can’t give you comprehensive answers. They aren’t even that important, but, obviously, the artifacts are real and I’m real. When you get _creeped out_ , you know, in that certain way, it tells you someone is probably using one close by. Or it’s in your head. Either way, you can just ignore it, for the time being. No one is trying to hurt you, never was. Brother just wanted to take the earphones.”

“Like you tried to take them from Gin?” Renji asked, and regretted the edge in his voice.

He supposed Rukia heard it. She turned to face the view outside. It was getting dark, and they were driving past a forested spot. The streetlights were on, painting the asphalt with their orange.

Renji was the first to break the silence with an apology.

“Gin was an accident,” Rukia answered, ignoring the apology. “That was… self-defence. Just one more way I fucked this up. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to you. 

“It’s me you get to thank, for being dragged out of school, too. I told my brother he should do it in public. You know, to avoid Gin 2.0 situation.That didn’t go down like I thought it would, though. I’m guessing you aren’t looking forward going back there? To school?”

Renji hadn’t given too much thought about it, and wasn’t about to start now.

“What about Kaname?”

“He’s not Kaname. The real Kaname was one of the guys whose memories he was taking. No one knows who the fake Kaname is, or was, least of himself. The real version lives far from here and is trying to figure out who he is. Doesn’t even remember his own mother.” Rukia shrugged. “They say that like it’s the worst of it. Personally, I don’t see the importance.”

“He has a knife.”

Rukia nodded. “Had. We took it from him. It’s dangerous, steals memories, if that wasn’t clear from the context. When there’re enough memories from enough different people in your head, you get fucked for real. There’s no knowing if they are your own or someone else’s, and before you know, you’ll be carrying guilt from arson, murder and jaywalking.”

“I think he took some from me and Shuhei.”

Rukia nodded again. Some of her sadness was gone. “You won’t be worse for it. Don’t worry. Everything is good on School Island. We’ve got the card, the gold bottle, and of course, the knife.”

Renji felt like he should have said something about Ichigo’s clock, Nanao’s compass, Orihime’s music box and Momo’s statue. But he felt like he was physically unable to get the words out.

Maybe it was just some weird trust issue.

As if.

“What do they do?” he asked instead.

Rukia’s brows knitted. “We don’t know. The card seems to stimulate melanocytes, meaning it’ll make you tanned, and probably something else. The gold keeps moving in the bottle, but no one knows how it’s possible. As far as I can tell, it’s a perpetual motion machine.

“That’s one thing you should know about the artifacts. They always affect people. Thoughts, memories, ability to tell lies, or even suntan, but if you see something physical doing something weird, it’s in your head. The gold bottle is the only known exception. Some of the important guys are shitting themselves about it.”

A new type of curiosity was rising in Renji – or rather, an old type. The type he hadn’t been feeling much lately. 

“How do they work? How’s something like that possible?”

Rukia was quiet for a moment, but offered a smile and then a reply: “It’s being investigated. My brother says it’s probably extremely advanced quantum technology, but my mentor says he says that only because it’s easier to say than magic… Which should bring you to the next question. Why would anyone make extremely advanced quantum technology in the shapes like earphones or an ugly card?”

Renji thought her smile was beautiful. It looked some much better on her than the Sadness.

He nodded, and Rukia continued: “That’s because when you destroy an artifact, its function jumps into some other thing. Your earphones are now harmless electronic waste. Something else somewhere else is fucking up someone else’s head. 

“The shitty thing is, it never jumps to, say, a rock on the bottom of the Dead fucking Sea. It’s always some man-made thing popping up somewhere it can do harm, preferably maximum harm, and they tend to congregate. So when you find one, you’ll probably find more. It’s been theorized that they actually get _worse_ every time the function jumps, so if you can avoid destroying an artifact, don’t destroy it. Don’t touch it when you don’t have to, just cram it so somewhere safe far from your person. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

Rukia gave a glance to a clock, and Renji did the same. The time wasn’t telling him much, but he supposed they were getting closer to the end of their trip.

It was dawning to him he had heard enough of the artifacts.

“What happened to you back in the children’s home? Back when you were taken?”

“I was probably too small to remember.”

Renji didn’t fully believe that. “It was the consultant guy who took you? Is he your family or what? A brother? You spoke of a brother before.”

“I was in a wrong place at a wrong time. That’s how it usually begins, just like in your case.”

“That’s a pretty rich coincidence.”

“Maybe. You just don’t talk about some things.”

Renji took the hint and didn’t press further.

Travelling together in otherwise empty bus felt strange. Renji could no longer see the details in the view outside. It had gotten too dark, and there were no longer streetlights. But the dots of light, the windows of houses peeking between the trees were getting increasingly common and closer to the road.

“What’s going to happen after this?”

“There’s a bus stop not far from here. You’ll change buses and ride back before you miss your curfew.” Rukia draw a sloppy quarter-circle on the air. “I don’t know, keep working to unfuck your head, call your friends. Your papers say you haven’t been in contact with them for months. I’m not an expert but that’s probably not good. Go back to school, graduate. Get a job, or become a hippie if that’s what does it for you.”

Renji nodded, not hiding his disappointment. “You?”

“I’ll ride a bit further, change buses a few times. I’ll go back where I came from.”

The words weren’t surprising, but Renji felt tears burning in his eyes. He didn’t want to cry in front of her, and focused on staring at a badly carved graffiti on the back of a seat in in front of him.

To his surprise, Rukia turned to him and brushed a couple loose strands of hair behind his ear.

“Listen, Renji,” her voice was soft in a way Renji had never heard it soft. “Don’t look so sad. What I’m going to tell you next probably sounds borderline idiotic to you, so I was supposed to keep my mouth shut about this… But I’ve missed you and the others. I don’t even remember much of how it was in the childrens’ home, so dwelling on it is so fucking stupid it makes me want to puke to admit it.”

Renji nodded. He didn’t think it was stupid, but trying to say otherwise would just make the tears fall. And he wanted, _needed_ to hear the rest.

“I feel,” Rukia continued, “like everything that happened ever since has been some random shit occupying my time while I’ve been waiting for my real life to continue, you know? That my life’s been on pause for 20 years. I want to unpause it.”

Renji’s eyes left the graffiti and focused back on Rukia. She was looking at him. When their eyes met, the almost sad expression on Rukia’s face turned to an innocent one.

It wasn’t the childlike innocence Renji was used to seeing on Child Rukia’s face, back when they had been kids. It was something completely different. Ironically, the innocence on Adult Rukia seemed to suggest something sinister was brewing.

“Yeah?” Renji managed, despite the lump still stuck in his throat.

“I don’t have much formal education, not even a high school diploma. I’ve been thinking something should be done to that, so I’ve been dropping hints that it might be in my best interests to go to school, and my brother is starting to bite.”

“Oh?” the lump in Renji’s throat suddenly changed shapes. Now it was a lump of hope so brittle he hardly dared to breathe around it, but he had to ask.

“What kind of school?”

“Something _not_ related to public hygiene, that’s for sure. Washing those windows sucked sweaty balls.” 

Renji smiled. Rukia nodded and opened her purse.

“My brother has the final say,” she said, going through the things in her purse, “but the heaviest hints I’ve been dropping kind of point to benefits of environmental engineering studies. Take this.”

The last remark was about an envelope Rukia had taken from her purse and was handing to Renji. 

“It’s nothing special, just some bus money so that you won’t be trapped in here, in case you are running low, and something to remember me by. To keep you anchored to this side of reality, too.”

Renji took the envelope. It was sealed, and he didn’t waste time ripping it open. Instead, he watched Rukia and tried to memorize everything of her. 

“You can’t go to engineering without a high school diploma. You’ll have to get that first.”

Rukia pressed the big red Stop button on the handrail. “Don’t worry about that. You have to get off here, but don’t worry. I’ll meet you again. Just lie low and don’t do anything too stupid.”

The bus was already slowing down. Rukia stood up so Renji could get past her.

Before hopping out, Renji yelled a brief thank you to the bus driver.

The doors closed after him, and the turn signal went on. Renji stayed to watch the bus start moving and, finally, vanish from his sight.

She hadn’t even waved goodbye.

Renji wondered briefly, almost idly, what he was supposed to do next. It was dark, the weather was between drizzle and rain, and he was in the middle of nowhere, and the bus stop was without any canopy. He’d get soaked if he stayed here too long.

Rukia had told him to go back to the hospital, but he didn’t have a faintest idea where he was, let alone which bus would get him back there. 

He decided on opening the envelope. In it he found a small amount of cash, a bus timetable with a map and notes indicating how to catch his ride back, and a photo of Rukia.

She was looking up to the camera with a wide smile on her face. On her right hand she was holding a huge rainbow-colored duster, while the left one rested on her waist. She was wearing a cleaner’s uniform, not the real boring version the hospital staff wore, but a costume, cute rather than sexy. At the right corner of the photo it read, with white ink, 

_To Renji_  
_♥: Eriko._

It certainly wasn’t a dirty picture, but it might as well have been. Renji cursed softly under his breath and ran his thumb over the picture. He put the photo back in the envelope, where it was safe from the rain, and then headed toward the bus stop the notes indicated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and that was the last chapter! It's done, it's done! YAY! Party party! 
> 
> :)
> 
> I wanted to be done before Christmas, but I wasn't. Then I thought I'd post on New Year's eve, but I didn't. Then I thought, well, 1st of January is a good day, when the last update shows 2021 people are probably more motivated to comment and leave kudos when they feel the story isn't that old (wink-wink-nudge-nudge). 
> 
> Then we started the year by having 3 (yes, three!) electrical blackouts. I'm not sure if we accidentally went to 1921 instead of 2021, or wtf happened.
> 
> But! Back to the program! 
> 
> I thank Polynya one more time for being an awesome beta! 
> 
> And I thank my readers making it this far. You don't seem to be numerous, but I hope you all have been enjoying the ride :)
> 
> The series will stay open for now - I have, let's say, half-planned sequel for this. Only time will tell if I'll ever write it. Right now I feel like I never want to write another word again (she said, writing stupidly long chapter notes), but that's really more related to work than ff so when things will smooth over there, I'll probably get more active with writing. Which doesn't mean I'll be writing the sequel, I have a ridiculous amount of unfinished projects waiting to be finished.


End file.
